A PHARMACEUTICALS multimillionaire charged with killing her autistic eight-year-old son in a deluxe hotel has lost a attempt to be released to house arrest.
Gigi Jordan modelled her bid for freedom on the conditions under which International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was released in his unrelated sexual assault case.
Jordan, who was found incoherent in a pill-strewn room with Jude Mirra in February 2010, says she felt justified in killing the boy and trying to kill herself to save them from people she feared were after them.
After about 18 months behind bars awaiting trial, Jordan sought similar conditions to those won by Mr Strauss-Kahn.
She also requested $6 million in bail, armed guards and electronic monitoring.
Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon today noted he had turned down a $5 million bond and house arrest proposal from Jordan last year. At the time, he cited factors including her roughly $40 million fortune and apparent psychological problems.
"The court still feels that the setting of bail is inappropriate in this case," Justice Solomon said in a ruling today.
And as for the parallel the 50-year-old Jordan drew to Mr Strauss-Kahn, "what another justice does in a case involving very different charges, completely different circumstances and a different defendant has no bearing on this court's decision", Justice Solomon wrote.
Mr Strauss-Kahn, who denies charges of trying to rape a hotel maid, was eventually released without bail after about six weeks on house arrest.
Jordan's lawyers said they planned to challenge the bail denial. Among other things, they argue the judge did not give enough consideration to jail psychiatric reports indicating Jordan's mental state has improved.
At this point, "she's on less medication than the average Manhattan professional", said Ronald Kuby, who is representing Jordan with Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz.
Manhattan prosecutors have previously called Jude's killing calculated and premeditated, and they have questioned the sincerity of the suicide attempt by Jordan, who made a fortune in the pharmaceuticals business before leaving it to care for her son.
Jordan, in a bail application so extensive it filled a plastic storage tub, said she felt she and her son faced such danger that she should take both their lives to spare him from suffering.
She said Jude had been tortured and abused by adults close to him, authorities rebuffed her pleas to investigate and a person in her and her son's lives had defrauded and manipulated her.
Ultimately, she said, she became worried she would be killed or institutionalised so that person could get control of Jude and her money.
She plans to build a novel defence around the behavioural concept of altruistic filicide - child killing by parents who believe they are acting in the child's best interests.
The case has been muddied by the disappearance of the only sample of Jordan's blood taken shortly after her arrest: a sample that could help or hurt her claim of having tried to kill herself, although her lawyers pointed to other signs of a suicide attempt, including her physical condition when found and a computerised note she left.
Amid debate between defence lawyers and prosecutors over procedures for testing the small blood sample for various prescription drugs, it was never tested before getting lost at the hospital where it was stored, prosecutors said last month.
Jordan's lawyers filed papers today seeking more information from prosecutors about the sample's disappearance.
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