During Crown’s day-long closing address earlier this week, Polkinghorne was described as a highly intelligent and arrogant “master manipulator” who also had a disturbing methamphetamine habit and a desire to end his 24-year marriage and start a new life with Sydney escort Madison Ashton. Crown has repeatedly said suicide “makes no sense” and has offered two alternative theories: either Polkinghorne got into an impromptu argument with his wife and lunged at her, or he surprised her while she was asleep in a planned killing.

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In his final response, delivered today, Mansfield accused the Crown of dereliction of duty because its theory failed to specify when, where, why and how Hannah was murdered.

“Let’s keep our options open,” he said sarcastically. “It’s just a murder trial.”

Mansfield also highlighted the many risk factors for Hanna’s suicide that mental health experts who gave evidence agreed on. He said she was a perfectionist, worried about professional disgrace, was grieving the recent death of her mother, reported previous thoughts of self-harm and had a dangerous combination of alcohol and sleeping pills. He blamed Hanna’s job for not actively limiting her working hours when they saw she was sending work emails at all hours of the night.

He noted that taking a meal to a friend’s house and taking belongings to the landfill the day before her death could be considered signs of suicidal ideation, but it was more likely that she committed suicide on an impulse in the middle of the night.

“There’s no lonelier place when you’re already feeling bad than the early morning hours,” he said. “When you’re that bad, that’s the darkest place you can be. It’s dark, it’s bleak, it’s desperate, and that’s where Pauline will probably wake up.”

He also experienced some of the darkest moments found in her emails. In March 2019, “I can’t live if this is a result of me being wrong,” she said of the prospect that her husband didn’t love her. “I’m lost.”

Mansfield said: “That, unfortunately, tells us a lot.”

In November 2019, during an accidentally recorded 24-minute conversation with her brother and niece, she called her husband a “sex maniac” and said he was angry at the world, but at one point she also said “I considered just throwing myself off a bridge.” Crown said it was a casual comment, but Mansfield said it should be interpreted in the context of all her other comments about self-harm.

In early January 2020, in an early draft of a letter she wrote to Polkinghorne after he disappeared for several days over Christmas, she wrote: “I feel very scared, confused, sad and incredibly alone at the moment.” In April 2020, she wrote herself an email saying she was tired and not herself.

“I am never good enough, no matter how hard I try,” she wrote. “I desperately want to tell someone, cry and ask for help, but everyone seems to think I am amazing and doesn’t want to know that I have weaknesses and flaws.

“… So I’ll go to sleep and I won’t sleep. Very uncharacteristic of me – and this is cumulative – who knows what might happen. I have to tell someone, even if no one but God sees it.”

In May 2020, she told her family it was her first full day off in eight weeks and that she had “mixed feelings” about her new job helping manage the COVID-19 response and that she was “being criticised and bullied and it was incredibly brutal”.

Mansfield recounted a January 2021 conversation with former career woman and current Anglican priest Gillian Reid, in which Hannah admitted she struggles to do her job well.

“She was working longer and harder and harder,” Reid testified. “She didn’t look well. This was a woman who was very stressed and struggling with what was going on around her.”

Then on March 28, 2021, exactly one week before her death, she wrote to her son-in-law and his wife: “My life is crazy and sometimes I don’t know what day it is. I (reluctantly) took on this role as head of vaccine logistics. I didn’t want to. But Philip was so proud of me when the pandemic hit, I thought he would be proud of me – and I think he is – but it’s incredibly hard and lonely.”

In the seven days before her death, Hanna was sending work emails at all hours of the day, even when most people were asleep.

“Are you really going to believe she wasn’t at risk of suicide?” the lawyer asked, finishing his argument. “Is what I’m suggesting to you a stretch?”

Hanna was a beautiful and competent woman, “but she didn’t always see it that way,” he said.

“She had weaknesses – that was a fact… There were friends who would have dropped everything if they had known how bad she was – including Philip. But no one saw through that facade because she didn’t want anyone to know.”

It’s OK, he said, if some jurors “can’t shake the image of a dirty old man who didn’t realize how good he was with Pauline.” They might even think his treatment of her contributed to risk factors for suicide, he said.

But the jury would have been an “emotional jailer” if they had found Polkinghorne guilty of being angry with him and feeling sorry for Hannah when he did not, Ms Mansfield added.

“There is no justice for Pauline if you ignore her weaknesses and the decision she made,” he said. “The decision you make has to be based on the evidence.

“If you think evidence is necessary in a case, before you convict a man… you already know the correct verdict in that case and there is no need for me to tell you.”

Judge Lang did not give an estimate of how long it would take him to sum up today.

Craig Captain is an Auckland-based journalist who covers courts and justice. He joined Herald in 2021 and has been covering court events since 2002 for three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.

This Herald we will be reporting on this case in a daily podcast, Accused: Polkinghorne TrialYou can follow the podcast on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, SpotifyBy Home page feed or wherever else you listen to podcasts.