Wife sentenced for trying to poison husband

Written by: Chris Vanderveen 05/15/2010



CASTLE ROCK - Jonathan Allen says it was unusual for his wife to be so interested in his eating habits.

"'Make sure you eat your greens,'" he said she told him that night. "'You need 'em.'"

He says it never crossed his mind that his wife was trying to poison him. It was the summer of 2008 and prosecutors say Lisa Leigh Allen had just placed leaves from a toxic plant in his salad.

"I had no idea what I was coming into," Jonathan Allen told a Douglas County judge on Friday. "My daughter was sitting on my lap as I was supposed to be eating something that was going to kill me."

Minutes later, that Douglas County judge sentenced his wife to four-and-a-half years in prison.

In 2008, prosecutors originally thought this was a case of attempted murder and charged her accordingly. But as more and more evidence came out they seemed more and more willing to cut a deal.

Lisa Allen decided to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree assault in exchange for a sentencing range of three to six years.

"Lisa Allen was [originally] facing a 48-year prison sentence," her attorney Scott Robinson said immediately after the hearing.

When asked about the four-and-a-half-year sentence, Robinson simply said, "My client chose to plead guilty. It was her decision. We have to accept the court's sentence and that decision."

Robinson insisted there was more to the case than it appeared. He said Lisa Allen had been the victim of emotional and physical abuse during the course of their marriage.

"On multiple occasions he had threatened to kill her if she left him," he told the court.

Robinson also told the court the evidence suggested Lisa Allen might have been trying to poison her husband in an effort to escape from the home. He said it was likely she never intended to kill him based upon the amount of Foxglove leaves that were put into the salad.

Jonathan Allen fiercely denied the accusations of abuse after the hearing.

"I never laid a hand on her in any way," he said. "If I had known bad things were going in her mind - that she was planning to do this - if I could have put a stop to this and we had just separated ... without her doing something so evil, I would have rather had it that way."

From: http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=138919&provider=top