Professor who helped mother die gets home detention

Nov 24, 2011, 0:12 GMT

Wellington - A New Zealand professor who helped his terminally ill, 85-year-old mother commit suicide was sentenced Thursday to five months' home detention.

Sean Davison, 50, who has campaigned for the public discussion of voluntary euthanasia, complied with his mother's wishes, and helping her was an act of love and compassion, his lawyer, Roger Laybourn, told the Dunedin High Court, news reports said.

Passing sentence, the judge said his offending was at the lower level, but the court had a duty to protect the sanctity of life, Radio New Zealand reported.

Davison was originally charged with attempted murder, but police amended that to inciting and procuring suicide when his trial began last month. That was further amended when he appeared for sentence, and he pleaded guilty to a charge that he 'did counsel and procure' his mother to kill herself in October 2006.

The judge ordered that his electronically monitored home detention be served in Dunedin, where his mother lived, meaning that Davison cannot immediately return to South Africa, where his wife and their two small sons live.

Davison heads the Forensic DNA Analysis Laboratory at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, which specializes in identifying DNA to resolve South African human rights cases.

The New Zealand charge arose after he wrote a book called Before We Say Goodbye, based on a diary he kept while looking after his cancer-stricken mother, herself a doctor and psychiatrist who unsuccessfully tried to starve herself to death.

In the 2009 book, Davidson said his mother had asked him to help her die.

'She and I, both believing like many people that the law should permit voluntary euthanasia with safeguards, had spoken of it and been in agreement,' he wrote. 'But it is something else when one is expected to put this belief into practice.'

He said that for legal reasons the publishers had omitted 'a few things that were in my diary. I regret this but abide by their request.'

When the trial began, police said that drafts of the book, in which Davison admitted giving his mother crushed morphine tablets in a glass of water at her request, had been sent anonymously to journalists who reported them.