Trevor Laffan: Sleep disorders must be the stuff of nightmares

I love my sleep.

For me, there is nothing nicer than heading off to bed at night and getting my head down on a comfortable pillow.

Thankfully I don’t have any trouble nodding off. I usually read for an hour or so and then I’m out for the count.

I’m in bed most nights by 10pm and wake every morning around six and read the paper online. That amount of sleep seems to suit me fine, so I have no issues.

Many people do though, and I sympathise with those who struggle to get a decent night’s sleep, especially those who suffer from sleep disorders like insomnia.

I can’t imagine trying to get through the day without proper rest, and then having to survive the night when it must seem like an eternity.

I have had minor bouts of sleep deprivation, like many of us did, when the children were babies, and occasionally during my working life when I did shiftwork. Anybody who has worked a night shift will tell you it’s hard on the system, and the sleep you get during the day never seems adequate.

It’s more natural to sleep when it’s dark like our ancestors did. They slept in caves in total darkness and came out in the morning when the sun woke them.

I’m not as old as them, but I do when the world wasn’t as bright as it is now.

I when we had no street lighting, and there wasn’t as much light in homes as there is now either. The glare we get from TV screens, mobile phones, tablets, etc, is relatively new so people who suffer from insomnia have a few extra obstacles to overcome.

On the other hand, there are also people who sleep deeply, and that can cause problems too, like those who suffer from parasomnia.

Parasomnia is a category of sleep disorder involving involuntary movements and behaviours, often with no awareness or memory of the event.

Apparently, a lot of our dreams are quite violent, but we don’t act them out because we are paralysed. But when you’ve lost that paralysis, you can act out your dream, and a lot of violent behaviours can occur.

Conditions that cause bodily movements that are not consciously controlled, and where the person has no memory or knowledge of it, come under the legal defence of automatism. That defence is based on an ancient rule in law that an involuntary act does not result in criminal responsibility being attributed to the actor.

While most people who break the law are considered criminally responsible for their actions, it seems that’s not always the case when you commit a crime in your sleep.

Having one of these sleep disorders has been successfully used as a defence in criminal cases.

According to a report by US News Health, this isn’t new. One case goes back as far as 1870 involving a man who fell asleep in the lobby of a Kentucky hotel. When a porter shook him to try to rouse him, the man drew a gun and shot the porter three times. While the porter held him on the floor, the man repeatedly yelled, “Hoo-wee!”

He reportedly then rose, left the room, and told a witness that he’d shot someone, and when he heard who it was, he expressed remorse.

The shooter was found guilty of manslaughter, but the conviction was reversed on appeal. Evidence that he had a life-long history of sleepwalking and that he’d been sleep-deprived before the attack was excluded from the first trial.

In another case, a Texas man, Isom Bradley, testified in the 1920s that he and his mistress were preparing for bed when he became alarmed about an enemy who had made a threat against him.

Fearing a secret attack, he went to bed with a pistol under his pillow. Later roused by a noise, he jumped up and fired shots.

When Bradley lit a lamp, he found his girlfriend dead at the foot of the bed. He was convicted of murder, but the conviction was reversed on appeal because the jury hadn’t been informed of the possibility that he could have been asleep and may have fired the shots without volition while in a somnambulistic state.

Kenneth Parks, a young Canadian man, was acquitted in the 1987 murder of his mother-in-law after using the sleepwalking defence.

On the night of her death, he arose from bed, drove 14 miles to the house of his in-laws and strangled his father-in-law until the man ed out.

He bludgeoned his mother-in-law with a tyre iron and stabbed them both with a kitchen knife. The woman died and the man barely survived. Parks then arrived at a police station.

Police said he seemed confused about what had transpired, and they noted that Parks appeared oblivious to the fact that he had severed tendons in both his hands during the attack.

That lack of reaction to pain, along with other factors, including a strong family history of parasomnias, led experts to testify that Parks had been sleepwalking during the attack.

Not conscious, not responsible, not guilty.

That defence doesn’t always work though, as Michael Ricksgers found out. He was convicted of murdering his wife.

He claimed he had accidentally killed her during a sleepwalking episode, which, defence lawyers argued, was provoked by a medical condition, sleep apnoea.

Prosecutors presented an alternative explanation that Ricksgers was upset because his wife was planning to leave him.

Ricksgers told police that he awoke to find a gun in his hand and his wife bleeding in bed beside him. He said he might have dreamed about an intruder breaking in, but that didn’t sway the jury.

Ricksgers was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Think I might sleep with one eye open from now on.