A schoolboy, found guilty of attempted murder after stabbing another student had a tendency to cast a self-serving "gloss" over events, a judge has found.
The 16-year-old, who cannot be named, had pleaded guilty to unlawfully wounding but not guilty to attempted murder and wounding in an attempt to maim or disfigure.
He was 14 when he stabbed a fellow Year 10 student in the neck at a Brisbane school in August 2013.
He was found guilty of attempted murder by Justice Jean Dalton in Queensland's Supreme Court in Brisbane last Friday.
In her reasons published on Tuesday, Justice Dalton rejected crucial parts of the boy's evidence.
She said she didn't believe he'd taken the 13.5 centimetre kitchen knife to school simply to scare off the other student.
Justice Dalton found him to be an intelligent witness who was "unusually responsive" to questioning and capable of giving nuanced, logical answers.
But the idea that a schoolyard scuffle the year before had intensified so severely he felt compelled to bring a blade to school to spook the victim was quite unbelievable, she said.
"In my view this evidence was false; a fabrication after the event," she writes.
This retrospective reasoning was also evident in other parts of his story, illustrating a tendency to cast a "self-justificatory, well-meaning gloss" over the incident to expunge blame.
Justice Dalton said the call the defendant made to triple-zero to report the stabbing - in which he said he'd done it because the victim threatened to bash his friend - showed a propensity to alter his story to make it more favourable.
But the judge accepted the boy was genuinely distressed during the conversation.
She also dismissed the idea he'd considered taking a pin or pair of tweezers to school instead of a knife.
"I do not believe ... that the selection of the knife as a weapon was a last-minute or spur-of-the-moment choice," she said.
Likewise, she rejected his claims he'd stabbed the victim in a fatty part of his neck because he didn't think there wasn't anything anatomically significant there.
The physical slightness of the defendant compared to his victim also made his story implausible.
Justice Dalton, who presided over the judge-only trial, withdrew bail when delivering her verdict last week.
It's likely the boy will be sentenced in late April or early to mid-May.
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