Death Sentence For Infanticide

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30406, 3 April 1964, Page 11

Death Sentence For Infanticide

(N Z. Press Association—Copyright)

PERTH, April 2. A jury in the Perth Criminal Court today found a 49-year-old university lecturer, Dr. Bernard Maurice Benn, guilty of the murder on February 8 of his four-and-a-half-year-old son, Bernard Wolfgang Benn, who was said to be mentally retarded. Dr. Benn was sentenced to death. Before the jury retired this afternoon, the Judge, Mr Justice Hale, warned them not to let emotion interfere with justice. .He said the insane could not be exterminated —not even the criminally insane. Dr. Benn, Scottish-born, and reader in German at the University of Western Australia, said he shot his son because he thought it was better that the boy should be dead than spend his childhood

in institutions and his adult life in mental hospitals. Dr. Benn said yesterday he feared the condition of his son would cause a mental breakdown for his wife, or even suicide. Today, counsel for Benn, Mr K. W. Hatfield, Q.C., told ' the Court Benn was not an advocate for euthanasia. It was the grim reality, the starkness of the realisation about the boy that pulled the trigger, he said. Mr Hatfield asked the jury: “Have you ever had a child sick for 24 or. 36 hours? ... At the end of it you are just about tormented. “Think of the anguish of the Benns, hour by hour, for nearly two years,” he said. A doctor at a Perth hospital had told Dr. Benn the child was virtually a vegetable, he added.'