DOCTOR ACQUITTED OF MURDER: PATIENT’S DEATH

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 March 1950, Page 6

DOCTOR ACQUITTED OF MURDER: PATIENT’S DEATH

NEW YORK, March 9.—Hermann Sander, a doctor, was acquitted at Manchester, New Hampshire, today, of killing his cancer patient, Mrs' Abbie Borroto, aged 59. Sander was tried for first-degree murder in in-, jecting air into Mrs Borroto’s veins on December’ 4. The case has been. labelled by the press as “mercy kill- ■ ing.” Sander was found not guilty by a' male jury of nine Roman Catholics and three Protestants in 69 minutes after the* hearings, which lasted for 14 days. ! His acquittal was cheered by the crowd in the courtroom. Spectators ignored Judge Harold Westcott’s warning against outbursts and began a demonstration. Sander, who had shown little emotion during the long trial, embraced his wife, and they, both cried for a few seconds before people crowded round them offering congratulations.

Principal Question The principal legal question which the jury had to consider was the time of Mrs Borroto’s death.- The prosecution maintained that Sander, on his own admission in the hospital’s records, had injected 40 cubic centimetres of air into Mrs Borroto’s veins. During the trial Sander claimed that Mrs Borroto was dead before he injected air into her.

Sander claimed that he was a victim of misquotation, and that the case never should have been taken to court. Denying that he had injected 40 cubic centimetres of air into Mrs Borroto’s veins, he said that his note for the hospital records had been dictated hurriedly and that he had given Mrs Borroto not more than 28 cubic centimetres of air. Sander said that there was no certainty that he had injected air into Mrs Borroto’s veins because he could not remember finding a vein. A written record in Sander’s favour was his entry on Mrs Borroto’s death certificate. He entered the cause of death as cancer. Medical Evidence For Defence

Di- Richard Ford, of Harvard University’s Department of Legal Medicine, gave evidence in Sander’s defence that even 40 cubic centimetres of air could not kill a human being. The prosecution sought a conviction by using Sander’s entry in the hospital records and his alleged statements after Mrs Borroto’s death. These were to the effect that Sander knew he had done wrong when he injected air, but that the law should be changed. Sander was alleged to have said that he killed Mrs Borroto at the request of her husband. Reginald. Sander during the trial denied this, and his denial was supported by Reginald Borroto. The Euthanasia Society of America will use the trial as the springboard for a campaign to legalise mercy deaths.

Mrs F. Robertson Jones, executive vice-president of the society, announcing this tonight, said that Sander’s acquittal showed that written law had lagged behind moral law. Mrs Jones added: “I don’t think any jury is now going to convict a mercy killer/ because they believe that mercy killing is morally right, although it is not yet legal.”