Euthanasia Author Faces Trial Over Mother's Death

New Zealand's most prominent euthanasia advocate is to face court next week charged with the attempted murder of her terminally ill mother in 1999.

Lesley Martin nursed her mother, Joy, through five months of cancer before giving her an overdose of morphine and smothering her with a pillow, in accordance with her mother's desire to die painlessly. Her mother died the next day. A postmortem examination said cause of death was respiratory arrest, possibly due to morphine poisoning or pneumonia.

Her book about the experience, To Die Like a Dog, caused police to reopen a homicide inquiry which had been dropped after 10 months for lack of evidence, and to charge her on two counts of attempted murder last year.

"This will be seen as the benchmark trial on voluntary euthanasia in New Zealand, because I didn't have to face all this. I didn't have to write the book which has landed me in court," Ms Martin said.

The title of the book was taken from the words of her mother, who had told her that she would prefer to die quickly like a dog being put down.

Ms Martin, 40, could face a maximum of 14 years in prison if found guilty, although the sentence is likely to be closer to two years and convertible to a period of home detention.

Since 1999 three people in New Zealand have been sentenced to jail terms of up to three years for the voluntary euthanasia of close relatives although polls consistently show around 75% in favour of doctor-assisted suicide.

Ms Martin's trial has caused widespread debate in New Zealand, following the narrow failure of a parliamentary bill legalising the practice of euthanasia last year.

The bill, which would have legalised only doctor-assisted euthanasia, was defeated by 60 votes to 58 despite the support of the prime minister, Helen Clark. It had been tabled by Peter Brown, the deputy leader of the New Zealand First party, on the same day that Ms Martin was charged by police. Mr Brown became a euthanasia advocate after his wife died of cancer in 1984. He has suspected that she was deliberately given a fatal overdose by doctors to ease her death.

"In all probability it was the medical people who decided, but under this bill, she would have had a say," he said. "In this age we can keep people pain-free but we can't keep their bodies from disintegrating. My first wife didn't want to die with her body falling apart. She valued her dignity."

Mr Brown was opposed to voluntary euthanasia at the time of his wife's death and says he "gets shudders" at the thought of the carbon monoxide-producing suicide machines promoted by Ms Martin's best-known ally, the Australian euthanasia advocate Dr Philip Nitschke. The proposed bill would only allow the law to be changed after a referendum. He plans to reintroduce the legislation in the next two months.

The New Zealand Medical Association is officially opposed to euthanasia, although half of doctors, in private polling by Ms Martin's pressure group Exit New Zealand, supported the practice.

Ms Martin said opponents of euthanasia needed to understand the practice would go on regardless of the law: "Until you've held your mother with a pillow between you until she's dead, like I did, until you've done that because of the lack of an environment where you can talk about these things legally - until you've done that, you don't know what pain is."