Bratty v Attorney-General for Northern Ireland [1963] AC 386, [1961] 3 All ER 523, [1961] UKHL 3 is a House of Lords decision relating to non-insane automatism.
In March 1961, twenty-year-old George Bratty had given a lift in his car to Josephine Fitzsimmons, who was later found dead under a hedge near Hillsborough, County Down, Northern Ireland, having been strangled.
He made a statement in which he said, inter alia I had some terrible feeling, and then a sort of a blackness.
I don't know really what caused it at all.Bratty's trial was heard at the Downpatrick Assizes, and his defence team proposed alternative verdicts, namely The judge refused to allow the first two defences to be considered by the jury, and accordingly gave a direction only on the issue of insanity.
The Court of Criminal Appeal in Northern Ireland considered that automatism meant the state of a person who, though capable of action, is not conscious of what he is doing ... it means unconscious involuntary action, and it is a defence because the mind does not go with what is being done.