When police officers broke down the door at the Peninsula Hotel in 2010, the evidence of what had happened inside Room 1603 seemed fairly clear.

Gigi Jordan, a multimillionaire pharmaceutical executive, was on the floor, disoriented and babbling. Her 8-year-old son lay on a nearby bed — stiff, cold, still. There were scores of pills and bottles of alcohol scattered about.

"I want a lawyer," she muttered to the first officers who asked her what she had taken, according to prosecutors. To another officer, she said she wanted to die.

Four and a half years later, Ms. Jordan, 54, will go on trial for murder in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Opening arguments in the trial, which is expected to last two months, are to begin Wednesday.

Ms. Jordan never disputed giving a fatal dose of drugs to her son, who was autistic and mute. She said it had been a mercy killing.

In a rambling suicide note, then in court papers and finally in a jailhouse interview, she said her first husband had intended to kill her, and she feared that her son would end up in the custody of his biological father, her second husband, whom she believed had tortured and raped the boy. She said she faced a choice between two evils.

"I was trapped in a corner," she told The Daily News in August 2012. "I was a mother trying to protect my young, my beautiful, my abused son from further sexual torture."

Killing a person to save him from future abuse has never been a recognized defense to murder in New York State — a point Justice Charles H. Solomon has made in his rulings on the case — and it remained unclear on the eve of trial precisely what Ms. Jordan's defense would be.

Ms. Jordan has gone through 11 defense lawyers and has buried Justice Solomon and the appellate courts with motions to dismiss the charges or to grant her bail. The state court file now fills seven banker's boxes.

Her current lawyers have indicated they will argue that Ms. Jordan killed her son, Jude Mirra, while in the grip of an extreme emotional disturbance. Under state law, if the jury agrees, she would be convicted of manslaughter rather than murder.

That defense allows Ms. Jordan's lawyers to present evidence supporting her complex tale, a story that she says involves the Philadelphia mob, large-scale financial fraud, death threats from her ex-husband and a satanic cult that tortures children.

"I can guarantee you, it's going to be a most interesting case," Justice Solomon told prospective jurors last week.

Ms. Jordan, incarcerated without bail at Rikers Island, has fought on several fronts, bringing petitions for her release because of trial delays while accusing prosecutors of misconduct.

In her motions, Ms. Jordan has accused the Manhattan district attorney of losing a vial of her blood and other DNA evidence, which she maintained was critical to her defense. She also accused prosecutors of improperly listening to recorded telephone calls she made to her lawyers from prison.

She has applied for bail 10 times, laying out a novel "altruistic filicide" defense in a 93-page bail application in June 2011. Last year, she went to federal court to claim she should be released from jail because it had taken so long for the case to come to trial. A judge rejected her petition.

In state court, Ms. Jordan accused two veteran prosecutors, Kerry O'Connell and Matthew Bogdanos, of misconduct so blatant, she said, that the murder charge should be dismissed.

At every turn, the courts have ruled against her.

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Ms. Jordan's lawyers have also shifted her defense strategy twice. Shortly after her arrest, her lawyers at the time, led by Gerald L. Shargel, told Justice Solomon that she would mount an insanity defense, but later, they abandoned that plan. She has never consented to be examined by a psychiatric expert for the prosecution.

Arguing for bail to be set in 2011, Ms. Jordan's lawyers outlined in detail the altruistic filicide argument, combining the theory that she acted in self-defense with the notion that she was coerced by a threat to kill. The concept has been used in other states to bolster insanity defenses, as in the case of Andrea Yates, a Texas mother who said she had drowned her children to save them from the devil.

But the defense has not been tried alone, without an insanity defense, according to experts on cases in which mothers have been accused of killing their children.

Earlier this year, Ms. Jordan's most recent legal team — Allan L. Brenner, Earl S. Ward and Norman Siegel — changed tack again. The lawyers are now pursuing a defense of extreme emotional disturbance. That strategy will hinge on the accusation that her first husband, Raymond A. Mirra Jr., a Philadelphia businessman, had threatened to kill her or have her institutionalized, her lawyers said.

She will also attempt to convince a jury that she had reason to believe her second husband, Emil Tzekov, a Bulgarian yoga instructor who is Jude's biological father, sadistically abused the child for years, causing a catatonic psychosis that doctors mistook for autism, her lawyers said.

"The jurors will hear horrific extraordinary circumstances that Jude Mirra and Ms. Jordan were subject to," Mr. Siegel said.

Both Mr. Mirra and Mr. Tzekov have strongly denied the accusations, painting them as fictions from a disordered mind. Mr. Mirra, who divorced Ms. Jordan in 2001, has filed a slander lawsuit against her in federal court. Ms. Jordan and Mr. Tzekov are also divorced.

In his complaint, Mr. Mirra said Ms. Jordan had crisscrossed the country for years seeing medical specialists in a futile quest to find a cure for Jude's autism. Then in 2008, Mr. Mirra said, she began accusing people of abusing the boy, even though "she was by Jude's side at all hours of the day."

Mr. Brenner, the lead defense counsel, said Ms. Jordan's perception of the threat from her two former husbands would be a key issue for the jury. "The defense has always, always, always focused around Gigi's state of mind," he said. For prosecutors, pinning down Ms. Jordan's motive for killing her son is less important than proving to jurors she intentionally did so. In court papers, Matthew Bogdanos, the lead prosecutor, pointed out that neither Mr. Mirra nor Mr. Tzekov were present when Jude died and that no evidence linked them to the child's death.

"Even if all the allegations she makes could be proved, it's still murder," Mr. Bogdanos wrote in an April motion.