"MERCY" KILLING

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 1, 2 January 1934, Page 5

"MERCY" KILLING

| DYING WOMAN'S END. STRUCK BLOW BY NEPHEW. MUREER CHARGE NOT UPHELD (From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, December 12. After nursing his aunt through a long illness, and when her death was apparently only a matter of minutes, John Stephens, aged 32, a son of a leading Georgia family, struck her a blow with the intention of killing her, and so ending her agony. She died! almost immediately. The coroner's jury decided that the blow did not kill her and that death came from natural causes. "She was dying, and death was but a matter of minutes," Dr. W. A. Selman, the attending physician, told the jury. "I cannot say whether the blow or the malady caused death." Stephens, held on a murder charge by police, was ordered to be freed. The jury ruled the woman would have died regardless of her nephew's "mercy" act.

! | Stephens smoked a pipe as he talked I of the slaying. He was unshaven and unkempt from days of waiting on his i j aunt and from the ordeal of his arrest , for murder. "I killed my aunt while I was in sound mind, in full possession of i my faculties and knowing exactly what I did," he said. "1 had been with her , i all Tuesday night and I knew her pain was terrible. While 0. E. Lasiter, her | brother-in-law, J. D. Stephens, her ' brother, and Mr. O. C. Wesley, her sister, I were in the dining room, I went out of the room and got a big clay flower pot. When I came back she was semi-con-scious. Turning so she would not see what I was doing, I hit her with all my strength. The others heard the blow and j came in. When they saw the blood and I the broken pot they didn't have to ask I me what I had done. They knew. . |

"When I was two my father died and my motner, liaving two other children, gave me to Aunt Allie. Aunt Allie has always been a mother to me; and raised me and made my Life happy. She was in terrible pain. But she was brave and never asked me to kill her to end the pain. I was afraid if I waited any longer that she might ask me and that would bo like suicide on her part. I would have hated that." "Decision Not for Relatives." "Mercy killings" were put in a category with lvnchings by Fannie Hurst, the noted writer, commenting in New York on the slaying of Aunt "Stephens by her nephew, who could not bear her suffering. Regardless of sympathy for the nephew, said Miss Hurst, an attempt to kill could not be condoned. "There is too much savagery just beneath the human cuticle," she explained. "Let it out, and it spreads like a forest fire. There is no borderline, only a hairline

between justification and madness. One cannot break the laws of life and justice, no matter what the circumstances."

A protest against allowing the 52-year-old woman to suffer was voiced by Miss Jane Hoey of the welfare council of New York.,, "How could anyone have known surely that she wanted to die t" asked Miss Hoey. "Sometimes people say so when they are suffering, and they don't actually mean it. At any rate, the decision of life and deatli should not be in tile hands of relatives. We never know positively that diseases arc incurable. There have been cancer patients who have lived fifteen or twenty years. The average practitioner is not a specialist in this disease, and only a cancer specialist could have told if the woman really were incurable." Stephens showed signs of emotional unstability and should be given hospital treatment himself, declared Judge Jeanette G. Brill of Brooklyn Women's Court.