A British man has called for a law change to allow assisted dying after pleading guilty for cutting his terminally ill wife’s throat in an “act of love”.
The jury cleared Graham Mansfield (73) of murder and found the retired baggage handler guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter after hearing how he and his wife, Dyanne (71) agreed to die together after the pain of her terminal cancer became too much to bear, reports The Guardian.
He killed her and then tried to cut his own throat but called police in desperation 12 hours later when he woke up still alive. He begged paramedics to let him die and admitted from the first 999 call that he had killed Dyanne.
Though he faced a maximum of life in prison for the killing in March last year, the judge imposed a two-year suspended sentence, saying the killing was “an act of love, of compassion, to end her suffering”.
Later, Mansfield said he would repeat what he admitted was a “horrible act” to end her suffering.
But he said he should never have been forced to take such a “desperate” measure and wants to see the introduction of a euthanasia law. “If you have a terminal illness and you are in the latter stages, and if you can get two independent doctors to talk to that person who wants to die, and to talk to their family and friends, and maybe get the police to do some sort of investigation, and they all come to the same conclusion: that there’s no quality of life, then they should be allowed to die.”
“We would have much preferred to have, say, Dyanne lying in bed upstairs, me holding her hand and somebody administering it (a lethal injection). That would have been a far more humane way of doing things.”
He said they had looked into travelling to Switzerland, where euthanasia is legal, “but it was lockdown, we couldn’t travel”.
In April, a month after Mansfield was charged, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) updated its guidance to prosecutors on the public interest factors to take into account in reaching decisions in cases of encouraging or assisting suicide. Fletcher said if Dyanne’s death had come a year later “he may never have been charged”.
From 1 April 2009 up to 31 March 2022, there were 174 cases referred to the CPS by the police that were recorded as assisted suicide. Of these 174 cases, 115 were not proceeded with by the CPS and 33 cases were withdrawn by the police.
The court heard evidence from a cancer expert who concluded after Dyanne’s death that she had between a week and four weeks to live when she died.
Mansfield said the couple made the suicide pact in October 2020 when Dyanne, his wife of 41 years, was diagnosed with terminal cancer that had spread to her lung and lymph nodes.
She was determined not to spend her final days in hospital, and had gone downhill rapidly after her diagnosis, with the cancer spreading to her neck, making it hard to swallow.
“She asked me to kill her when things got too bad,” he remembered. “They were the saddest words I had ever heard. My immediate thought was, all right, Dyanne, but I’m going to die with you. I can’t live without you.’”
He described how the couple walked together to the bottom of their garden to a secluded section, shielded from the neighbours, and placed two garden chairs side by side. He used a knife to cut her throat twice as she sat silently before hugging her and telling her he loved her. He then sat down next to her and tried to do the same to himself.
It never occurred to him he would end up on trial for murder 15 months later: “We were going to kill ourselves and that was the end of it.”
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
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Austria submits draft legislation on assisted suicide
Despite Catholic majority, Spain wins right to medically assisted death
First evidence heard in Gauteng High Court ‘right to die’ case