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So you smothered your wife to death? Shrug.

I have already reported on the United Kingdom's functional legalization of assisted suicide. To recap briefly, prosecutorial "guidelines" broadly hint (without quite promising outright) that those who assist the suicides of certain disfavored classes of people, allegedly at the request of the victim, will not be prosecuted. And indeed these "guidelines" have played out exactly as predicted, including in their ambit not only procuring pills, etc., but also active killing. Michael Bateman suffocated and gassed his wife to death, allegedly at her request, and was not prosecuted.

And now, fffolks, it's time for the next step! Actor Stuart Mungall killed his wife, Joan, who suffered from Pick's Disease. This is evidently not in question. He deliberately smothered her to death with a pillow. Moreover, he doesn't even allege that she asked him to do so. Instead, he alleges (you can't make this stuff up) that he "saw it in her eyes" that she wanted to die. (The day before he killed her she told a nurse that she was "taking it all in [her] stride." I guess the nurse wasn't skilled in eye-reading.)

So the prosecution did prosecute. (Whoo-hoo!) However, the prosecution accepted Mungall's plea bargain to manslaughter (!) on grounds of diminished responsibility from the strain of caring for his wife! Is this starting to sound like satire is dead? "Well, you see, your Honor, it was just such a strain taking care of her, and then I saw it in her eyes that she wanted to die, so I smothered her." The poor, stressed fellow smiled at his supporters and got a thumbs-up sign from them in the courtroom after the judge decided to sentence him to no jail time.

The news story is a bit confusing. It quotes, apparently from the trial, the "Recorder of London" as saying to Mungall that the court has a responsibility to show that "you can't take the life of another as you did." Was this an argument against the judge's suspending the sentence? Was it simply a defense of there having been any prosecution at all? The story doesn't say. In any event, the court certainly didn't even begin to show anybody that you can't take the life of another. To the contrary, Mungall's non-sentence makes fifty lashes with a wet noodle look like cruel and unusual punishment. For that matter, the Recorder of London prefaced his "get tough" bit about "showing that you can't take the life of another" with this gooey slab of glory, laud, and honor: "You have had a praiseworthy life...earning the plaudits of all who knew you, who recognise the devotion you showed your wife in the care you showed her." Um, yeah. Thanks, but no thanks for that kind of devotion and care.

Mungall is happy now. He's off scot free, and Joan? Well, Mungall's solicitor says that the killer is relieved that she is now "at peace and without pain." R.I.P.

Don't be disabled in England. It's open season.

HT Secondhand Smoke

Comments (24)

Contemporary Great Britain, as much as any other modern state, seems to exemplify the phenomenon of "anarcho-totalitarianism." The government will not take coercive action against genuine threats to people's lives and property, but it will ruthlessly and aggressively punish minor thoughtcrimes. This is the same country where a Christian themed coffee shop was fined and harassed for having a television screen displaying bible verses, and where elementary school children have dossiers dutifully recording any "bigoted" speech offenses.It is stunning; rather like an Anthony Burgess novel sprung to life. I keep reading these stories out of Britain and it just seems like it is turning into the most absurd society on earth.

Exactly. It looks like you're safer in England if you smother your sick wife to death with a pillow than if you express "bigoted" opinions.

The scariest thing about it is that there are real people for whom these are real priorities--real people who think that what Mungall did was less bad than what someone does who expresses what they regard as "racism" or "bigotry" against mascot groups.

Well, it will likely get even worse. The British leftists need about ten more years, and then they will be openly arguing that Mungall did something positively noble, because it is positively *selfish* for disabled people to want to keep living when precious limited resources could be allocated to the young and healthy. Give them a few more years , and they'll then be arguing that euthanasia should be mandatory in certain circumstances for the good of society as a whole. We will be looking at "Logan's Run" social democracy.

There are plenty of people in Britain (and I'm afraid in America) who do think that. I've quoted some of them here. Baroness what's-her-name and one fiction author, last name of Amis, but not Kingsley. Martin? I put up their outrageous quotations here in other posts implying a duty to die. "Hate speech" against the elderly and disabled, one might well say.

What's basically happening is that Britain is going to, as you indicated, a situation of anarchy as regards killing disabled relatives. So on a case-by-case basis, the caregiver himself can decide that the disabled person has a duty to die and bump him off. The legal fig leaf of its being the person's wish is disappearing really fast--as seen here. It's just becoming a transparent lie. "Saw it in her eyes" indeed. If that'll fly, anything will.

"Saw it in her eyes" indeed. If that'll fly, anything will.

Ironically, "I saw a woman full of life" wouldn't be an excuse for another relative to take the life of the caregiver.

You mean, to defend the wife?

Well, especially not in England.

I don't know about killing, but I'm pretty certain that in many states in the Union in the U.S. you would at least be allowed to use force of some kind to stop him if you caught him in the act. Probably even in England he was careful to smother her when they were alone.

"Well, you see, your Honor, it was just such a strain taking care of her, and then I saw it in her eyes that she wanted to die, so I smothered her."

Remembering your previous entry, I wonder if he had to change a bedpan. Twinkie Defense? Now we have the Bedpan Defense.

Sadly here in the UK the lefties (even the tories are pro sodomite and pro euthanasia) rule, death threats were sent to an MP who Shock actually thought it was a good idea that women considering an abortion should be given advice from somebody who was NOT the abortion 'provider'.

As for sodomites, well they are the darlings of the political classes, a Priest I know received hate mail for daring to defend (in a calm tone) the Traditional teaching of Marriage on his blog, they even tried to get his Bishop to shut him up, thankfully Bishop Conrey is made of sturn stuff and is backing his Priest to the hilt.

The Inmates have taken over the Asylum

Given the dwindling birth rate in England, these laws allowing assisted suicidebwill only work for so long. Eventually, outsiders will replace the laws with something like Shari'a :( Not to worry.

The Chicken

I wonder if he had to change a bedpan.

Yeah, that might do it. Anyone would snap, right?

You mean, to defend the wife?

Heh...

I was noting the irony that society would not tolerate for a minute her relatives hunting him down and delivering some gangland style justice to him in retaliation for murdering her.

It just goes to show that we truly have the collective ethics of a pack of savannah scavengers. To whit, "Thou shalt not prey upon the able, but upon the weak and defenseless thou shalt devour and rend asunder with impunity."

[Okay, had to edit this, Mike T. Slightly childish humor. LM]

The death penalty, apparently, is legal in Great Britain, as long as it is an act between consenting adults.

Frank, it is. In the earlier entry called "Contract Killing" I pointed out that in law school you used to be taught that murder doesn't cease to be murder because the other person agreed to be killed. But apparently that's no longer the case in the UK.

However, the Mungall case makes it clear that the "consenting" claim can be pretty much a joke. We're moving on to the next step--non-consensual murder, as long as the victim is disabled and the killer is the caregiver. The murderer can say what he wants and walk away free.

Another "choice devours itself" case: We start with the "choice" to be killed, which is supposedly such a great boon to the victim, and then when people are killed _without_ their choice, we lie and pretend that maybe they chose it and that, somehow, it's okay, because it was really for their own good anyway. The supposed beneficiary of the "choice" no longer has a choice.

@Lydia:

I think there is an interesting meta-ethical corollary. If we really want to keep the train rolling down this track, then why should we even feel the need to ascribe an implicit desire to die to the person we want to kill? Suppose someone suffers persistent and intractable chronic pain. They do not, however, wish to die. But they make me really, really unhappy because they are cramping my lifestyle and I'm spending all my time caring for them instead of doing what I want to do with my time. Why doesn't the simple fact that they are making me miserable, and cannot enjoy their own life, justify a non-consensual murder in this case? After all, they are selfishly imposing on me by not Euthanizing themselves, shouldn't I have the right to knock them off? Isn't it too much to ask to let them live when they are causing me so much heartache?

Quite right.

And I think this is how the psychological situation works. The left fights for a particular "choice" because they think it's such a great benefit. The temptation to force that "choice" onto the "beneficiaries" later can be pretty overwhelming, because what's really driving the train is the idea that *this is for the best*. If they didn't think it was for the best, they wouldn't get so worked up about the choice in the abstract.

The choices we care about are usually the choices we think are at least sometimes reasonable or even positively good. But then what happens if some choice is reasonable and good but the stupid beneficiary doesn't see it that way?

Similar example is the father I've written about before here who "staged an intervention" because his teenage daughter didn't want to agree to an abortion. Darn it, why couldn't she see how grateful she should be to have the "choice" to abort her baby?

The poor, stressed fellow smiled at his supporters and got a thumbs-up sign from them in the courtroom after the judge decided to sentence him to no jail time.
I wonder why some people will not see that such is the inevitable result of refusing even to contemplate capital punishment when it is appropriate?

But following the current logic, why do they even have to be the beneficiary? Suppose my elderly invalid wife benefits, but only a little bit, from my decision to care for her at substantial personal inconvenience. One day I get sick of her and so I decide that I'll terminate her life a few years early. Is it really inconceivable that, in another 20 or 30 years, we'll have secular leftists arguing that in this situation continuing to care for her would be a "supererogatory" moral action that no one could reasonably expect me to perform? And that my decision to kill my wife should, in light of her meager "quality of living" prospects, be punished as a misdemeanor offence instead of homicide? At the current rate of moral free-fall, I see no reason why this isn't entirely plausible.

In the earlier entry called "Contract Killing" I pointed out that in law school you used to be taught that murder doesn't cease to be murder because the other person agreed to be killed. But apparently that's no longer the case in the UK.
It's even worse that that -- self-defence is now frequently "murder".
Is it really inconceivable that, in another 20 or 30 years, we'll have secular leftists arguing that in this situation continuing to care for her would be a "supererogatory" moral action that no one could reasonably expect me to perform? And that my decision to kill my wife should, in light of her meager "quality of living" prospects, be punished as a misdemeanor offence instead of homicide?

Yeah, I sort of meant "beneficiary" ironically. That is to say, the idea originally was supposed to be that the elderly invalid wife is better off dead and that this is why the leftists have struggled so hard for her to have a right to choose to be made dead--legalized suicide, which allegedly benefits her because she gets to choose to die, which is better for her. Then later, if she doesn't _see_ that she's better off dead and her husband kills her, we can rationalize it by saying that, unbeknownst to her, she really _is_ better off dead. In this sense she's the "beneficiary" of the wonderful "opportunity" to die.

The death penalty, apparently, is legal in Great Britain, as long as it is an act between consenting adults.

Apparently, in the UK a woman can consent to being killed by giving a discrete look in her eyes but her verbal consent to have sex while drunk is meaningless.

Slightly off-topic, but maybe someone can explain this to a philosophical illiterate like me. For the purposes of my question, assume that the distinguished philosopher making the pro-euthanasia argument rejects the Christian hope of resurrection or any sort of after-life. In that case, death means complete annihilation, that is, being dead means not to be. So how can not-to-be be coherently described as "better off"? To be and not-to-be can form a question on the lips of a melancholy prince, but they are also not commensurable, so in what sense is not-to-be "better"? What are the cogent arguments, if any, that pro-euthanasia philosophers advance to settle this question? Or do they argue that the question is meaningless?

@G:

From a hedonistic utilitarian perspective, the dead person is neither well off nor poorly off but is in "zero" state from the perspective of utility. No experiences, no overall impact on aggregate utility. Someone in a disabled state or experiencing intractable pain is in a "negative" utility state. Hence, the transition from "alive and in pain" to "dead" is a net positive from the standpoint of utility.

Quite right, Untenured. My use of "better off dead" was colloquial.

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