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<\/a><\/p>\n“After much soul searching I realised that it was not my choice, it was my mother’s. Who was I to play God and tell her that she must continue rotting in her own bed until her death?\u00a0It was her decision.”<\/p>\n
He finally acceded; he gave\u00a0her a lethal dose of crushed morphine tablets mixed with water.<\/p>\n
That such a tragic story can be told in such abrupt and prosaic terms speaks to its familiarity. Not just the familiarity of Davison’s experience, but of other sons and\u00a0daughters, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers and\u00a0friends.<\/p>\n
Nurse Lesley Martin was sentenced to 15 months for the attempted murder of her dying mother, Joy.<\/p>\n
Evans Mott\u00a0was discharged without conviction after admitting\u00a0a charge of aiding and abetting his wife Rosie’s\u00a0suicide.<\/p>\n
Suzy Austen, a euthanasia campaigner with Exit International, was convicted for importing pentobarbitone used by some people to end their lives.\u00a0And for every case to make the headlines, there are others who die quietly at home with few questions asked.<\/p>\n
Davison was charged with attempted murder; he agreed to plead guilty to assisted suicide. He was sentenced to\u00a0five months’\u00a0home detention, finally returning to his wife and children in South Africa in May 2012.<\/p>\n
There, he became a prominent voice for assisted dying. Last year, in\u00a0the Western Cape High Court, he was\u00a0sentenced to three years\u00a0house arrest for his involvement in the deaths of three men:\u00a0his friend, Dr Anrich\u00a0Burger, who became a quadriplegic after a car crash;\u00a0Justin\u00a0Varian, who had motor neuron disease; and 32-year-old athlete\u00a0Richard Holland, left with\u00a0locked-in syndrome after a cycling crash.<\/p>\n
“I would be grateful if you would consider a formal application for a pardon for the assisted suicide conviction I received in 2011. If the new law had been in place then my mother would not have gone on a hunger strike, content in the knowledge that she could have had a legal assisted death if her suffering became too great. I would not have been asked to help her to die, and I would not have a criminal record for doing so.” \u2013 Dr Sean Davison<\/em><\/p>\n Now, with the End of Life Choice Act<\/em> referendum legalising assisted dying in New Zealand, 59-year-old Davison has written this week to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. “I would be grateful if you would consider a formal application for a pardon for the assisted suicide conviction I received in 2011,” he wrote.<\/p>\n “If the new law had been in place then\u00a0my mother would not have gone on a hunger strike, content in the knowledge that she could have had a legal assisted death if her suffering became too great. I would not have been asked to help her to die, and I would not have a criminal record for doing so.”<\/p>\n His application for a pardon will not be the only one.<\/p>\n Law Professor Andrew Geddis, at the University of Otago, points to the precedent of Parliament quashing historical convictions for homosexual acts. This was done by passing a law that set up specific criteria for who qualified to have their convictions expunged, what sorts of convictions were covered, and how that process was to take place.<\/p>\n “It didn’t have to be done this way,” Geddis\u00a0points out.\u00a0“The Government could in theory have used individual decisions to grant, or not grant, the prerogative of mercy\u00a0to expunge convictions.”<\/p>\n The advantages of a law change, to expunge convictions connected to helping loved ones\u00a0die, was that it clarified who\u00a0qualified,\u00a0and\u00a0what the legal effect was of the\u00a0convictions\u00a0being quashed. Legislation also represented\u00a0all of Parliament, not an individual Minister.<\/p>\n “Even if we’ve now decided that the terminally ill who are suffering should have a way to end their lives, is that the same as saying that we think the criminal law ought not to have applied to those who carried out such actions in the past?”\u2013 Professor Andrew Geddis<\/em><\/p>\n “What about those convicted of aiding people to die in the past? There’s going to be far fewer of these convictions than was the case for convictions for homosexual men,” he says.<\/p>\n “As a society, we’ve accepted that it never was right to make gay men criminals. Even if we’ve now decided that the terminally ill who are suffering should have a way to end their lives, is that the same as saying that we think the criminal law ought not to have applied to those who carried out such actions in the past?”<\/p>\n For Minister of Justice Kris Faafoi, the answer is “no”.<\/p>\n “There are no plans to legislate for the quashing of historical convictions for assisting suicide or related offences.”<\/p>\n He says\u00a0the End of Life Choice Act<\/em> did\u00a0not decriminalise aiding a suicide. It\u00a0established\u00a0a detailed procedure and eligibility criteria for somebody to request and receive assisted dying, which would involve oversight, transparency and accountability. “Historical cases, which resulted in convictions, would not necessarily have been eligible and therefore legal under the End of Life Choice Act<\/em>.”<\/p>\n “The social context regarding assisted suicide is not comparable, nor is the nature and consequence of the actions involved where a person takes another person\u2019s life.” \u2013 Kris Faafoi, Minister of Justice<\/em><\/p>\n Faafoi says the\u00a0Criminal Records<\/em> (Convictions for Historical Homosexual Offences) Act<\/em> 2018\u00a0was the only\u00a0precedent in New Zealand for wiping convictions on the basis that the conduct was no longer regarded as criminal.<\/p>\n “That legislation was enacted because societal views towards homosexuality have moved so far that the law criminalising homosexual acts is now viewed as highly discriminatory and manifestly unjust,” he argues.<\/p>\n “The social context regarding assisted suicide is not comparable, nor is the nature and consequence of the actions involved where a person takes another person\u2019s life.”<\/p>\n But Davison, a professor at the University of Western Cape,\u00a0believes that is missing the point. There was no legal framework of any kind to give people like his 85-year-old mother a choice about how she died. She was not allowed to take her own life; she was not allowed to ask him for help; she was not allowed to ask her doctor.<\/p>\n “It is wonderful that New Zealand\u00a0has approved this new end-of-life law, and hopefully this will provide a stepping stone for a law that goes beyond the suffering of the terminally ill,” Davison says.<\/p>\n “If the new law was in place at the time when my mother was dying, she would certainly not have gone on a hunger strike that made her final weeks so dreadful. She would not have been in the situation where she had to beg for help to die, and I would not have been charged with murder for helping her to die.”<\/p>\n Suzy Austen is another who feels her hand was forced by the lack of an assisted suicide law. The\u00a0euthanasia campaigner\u00a0smuggled the drug pentobarbitone\u00a0in her toilet bag (“I haven’t admitted that to anyone!”)\u00a0coming back into New Zealand.<\/p>\n Those days of international travel are now all but over.<\/p>\n She was convicted of two counts of importing\u00a0a Class C drug, convicted, and fined $7500. She was found not guilty of assisting Annemarie Treadwell’s 2016 suicide.<\/p>\n Austen, an outspoken euthanasia\u00a0campaigner at 69 years old, wears her conviction\u00a0as something of a badge of honour. But it does mean she and her husband can no longer travel to the US, as they loved to do, nor to Britain for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n
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