What if a person who sleepwalk killed another person?

i say that would be very tough to deffend on the court of criminal law. greetings. : )

Don't get me wrong, I am not a voilent person usually. My husband and I were married about 3 months. One night he woke up with me sitting on top of him trying to strangle him. I was telling him he ruined it because he left the towels on the floor. He got me off him, hopped out of bed and went and hung up the towels. The next morning he was telling me about it and he had marks on his neck from where I tried to strangle him. The only thing I remembered was the words I said, not the actions. When he told me waht I said I thought that was just a dream. We have wondered what would have happened to me if I had actually killed him. I wouldn't have known what I had done but it would have been my fingerprints on his neck. The silly thing is, it didn't bother me that the towels were on the floor. Luckily I have never done anything else like this and we laugh about it now. It is just scary with what I nearly did that night and didn't know about it. I have never hit or been voilent to anyone in my life, so I don't know where this came from.

I guess this is a question that varies a lot by jurisdiction and crime committed, etc. But I've done a bit of reading on this because, at one time, my husband was a terrible sleepwalker and I found it scary... not that I expected he would commit any crimes, of course, but I was more afraid of him hurting HIMSELF. During one vacation we took together before we were married, he got up from the bed, walked over the table where I was working and proceeded to have a verbal conversation with me which, while easy to understand, really made no sense. I finally realized he wasn't really awake but was sleepwalking. I told him to go back to bed, which he did... and as soon as his body hit the mattress, he was snoring again! It's very scary to see what some people are capable of in a state of altered consciousness! In any case, as I mentioned, I've read a bit about a defence called "automatism"... here is one short definition but I'm sure there are many others: "... involuntary, unconscious behaviour where the physical movements are performed without volition or without exercise of the will (eg, a person, as a result of an external blow to the head, commits a prohibited act while in an unconscious or semiconscious state, or a person who commits an offence while sleepwalking" I imagine, if a person sleepwalks, that it's hard to prove that they voluntarily committed a crime... but wouldn't it be even harder to prove they were sleepwalking????