No Mercy- In my opinion

5 February 2009 - The notion of mercy killing or compassionate homicide periodically reappears in the news, editorials, or legislative agendae. For example, here in Canada in 1994, a Senate Committee recommended legislation that would create a third category of murder, classified as “compassionate homicide.” This new category would apply to cases where an individual killed another person when the motivation was compassion rather than malice. In other words, it would differ from other forms of murder, not in the actions of the killer or the outcome of those actions. It would differ from other murders only in the motivation behind the action and by the fact that there would be a lesser penalty, with no minimum sentence. Some have even suggested that compassionate homicide should not be considered a crime at all.

There are many problems related to this idea, and I am only going to discuss two closely related ones here: (1) Criminalizing motivation, and (2) equal protection of the law. 

Criminalizing motivation. The decriminalization of compassionate homicide or mercy killing means that murder is no longer defined by solely the act and by the outcome, but rather by the motivation. Mere facts that the victim is dead as a result of intentional deadly actions on the part of a killer are no longer enough. It now becomes necessary to prove that the killer wanted to do harm rather than to help the victim. But how do we know this motivation? We have no way to collect direct evidence of an individuals motivation. All we can really do is to ask the individual how he or she was motivated or speculate based on the circumstances.

Here are some examples of people who claimed they they acted solely out of compassion. Which of the following seem to be credible cases of compassion to you?

In 1948, Karl Brandt was hung after being convicted in the post-war “Doctors’ Trial.” He had been an important figure in planning and organizing the Germany’s euthanasia program under the Nazi regime. Brandt spoke eloquently at his trial, suggesting that 275,000 people with disabilities killed under the Nazi euthanasia program were killed out of compassion and that in the more enlightened future the civilized world would follow this same path.

In the 1980s, Genene Jones was a licensed vocational nurse who is believed to have killed about 16 babies in the pediatric intensive care unit at a Texas hospital. When the pattern of deaths became hard to ignore, the hospital remarkably considered these “mercy killings” an administrative concern and wrote a letter or recommendation for her to get a a job in a pediatricians office where it was thought that she would not be caring for critically ill children. Only after, healthy children in the pediatricians office began to experience cardiac arrests, as the motive for compassionate homicide discounted.

In 1986, Gwendolyn Graham and Cathy Wood, killed  a half dozen of the patients in the Alpine Manor nursing home where they worked. It was suggested that they committed these “mercy killings” out of compassion. For example, Wood’s husband wrote the judge, “all of the patients weren’t even living. they enjoyed nothing, experienced nothing, and were going to die” and their families “were relieved at the end of the suffering.” This sounds very compassionate, but Cathy Wood also told people, “we did it because it was fun,” and evidence showed that they picked the victims as part of a game to spell the word “MURDER” with the initials of their victims. 

Susan Smith drowned her two young sons in 1994 in South Carolina. She initially claimed that they had been abducted. When she was arrested, she confessed to drowning them and claimed that she did it to prevent them from suffering through her divorce. Of course, it is true that children suffer from family breakups, but the general public was skeptical about her claim that this was an act of compassionate homicide. Is this the kind of compassionate motivation that we are talking about?

In 1997-1998, Christine Malvère allegedly killed 7 patients in the French hospital where she worked as a nurse. She confessed saying that she wanted to help them die out of compassion. Some new reports claim that she actually killed around 30 patients. She also wrote a book advocating for mercy killing. She later revised her claim downward, stating that she had only killed two patients intentionally and two others accidentally. She also claimed that the two that she killed had asked her to kill them, but their families denied those claims. She was eventually sentenced to 10 years for six murders. 

In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children. Her explanations varied, but there was a consistent theme. At some times she claimed that she believed that her children were better off dead that alive with a bad mother. At others, she claimed that she wanted her children to die with and go to heaven with souls unstained by sin. In either case, she believed that she had been motivated by compassion. She was originally convicted of murder, but on appeal found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.

In 2008, charges are pending against two nurses at a Woodstock, IL nursing home related to giving patients fatal or potentially fatal overdoses of medication. One nurse is supposed to have actually carried out the act. The other is her supervisor, who is alleged to have known about these acts, joked about it, and encouraged the other nurse to continue. Incredibly, the supervisor’s defense seems to be based not on proving the allegations against her are untrue, but rather that if true, her actions are a normal part of nursing practice and within the scope of her professional training. 

Of course, these are only a handful of cases, and one might be tempted to think they are rare exceptions. They are not. For example, several studies show that about 50% of parents who kill their own children do so believing that they are acting from compassion or altruism. 

In addition, The Crime Classification Manual: A Standard System for Investigating and Classifying Violent Crimes, developed by the leading criminal profilers tells us that the so-called compassionate motivation attributed to mercy killers is not the real force behind these killings, at least in the majority of cases:

Death at the hand of a mercy killer results from the offenders claim/perception of victim suffering and what the offender believes is his or her duty to relieve it. Most often, the real motivation for mercy killing has little to do with the offender’s feelings of compassion and pity for the victim. The sense of power and control the offender derives from killing is usually the real motive.  From Douglas, J. E., Burgess, A. W., Burgess, A. G., & Ressler, R. K. (1992). Crime Classification Manual: A Standard System for Investigating and Classifying Violent Crimes. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

As a society, I don’t think to we are willing to accept a claim of  compassionate motivation as an excuse for murder, and I don’t think we should be. Going back to the listed cases, which ones seem plausible and which ones are quickly rejected?Most people quickly reject the cases that involve healthy victims without disabilities. The idea of being compassionate  enough to kill someone because that individual is suffering through a family breakup or has a bad mother, or is poor, or lonely, or just generally unhappy seems bizarre to most people. However, some people begin to view it very differently, if the victim has a significant disability.

Equal Protection This brings me to the second point. If a society says that we will automatically reject the idea of compassionate homicide in cases involving healthy victims without disabilities but we will consider it in cases where victims have illnesses or disabilities, we deny people with disabilities equal protection of the law. We effectively make the penalty less for killing people with disabilities less than the penalty for killing anyone else. This no more acceptable than making it less of a crime to kill people of a particular race, gender, or religion.

So any compassionate homicide law would have to be based on the notion that compassionate homicide would be equally acceptable when applied to an individual without a disability as to an individual with a disability. Ironically, most proposals for compassionate homicide or assisted suicide legislation attempt to limit it to certain groups of victims. This is conceptually unacceptable. If we are willing to accept that some people with disabilities have lives that are not worth living, we need to be equally willing to accept that some people without disabilities have lives that are not worth living. If we are willing to assist people with disabilities to kill themselves, we had better be prepared to help everyone else who feels suicidal to do the same thing. 

Anything else is just a deadly form of bigotry.

Tags: "Mercy" Killing, Ethics, Homicide