Woman walks free after mercy killing case

A widow aged 69 who tried to murder her deaf, blind and bedridden mother in a mercy killing wept yesterday when she was given a suspended prison sentence.

Doreen Marshall had admitted crushing sleeping pills into her 90-year-old mother's food and drink in desperation at the quality of her life on 27 May this year. Marshall, from Dunstable, Bedfordshire, received a 12-month sentence suspended for two years for attempted murder after the judge at Aylesbury Crown Court heard the exceptional circumstances surrounding her plan to kill Cecilia Maxwell, who was incontinent and had suffered years of clinical depression, at her residential home in Luton.

Passing sentence, Judge Rodwell QC said: "It is, I think, common ground between prosecution and defence that your mother's existence was absolutely wretched beyond belief ... I am quite satisfied on the evidence before me that what you were attempting [what] is sometimes described as a mercy killing.

"What your motive was, was one of mercy and consideration for your mother," he said. "The law does not permit mercy killing. That is the law, there are very good reasons for that law, but I have to pass a sentence of imprisonment to mark the gravity of this offence."

He said he considered there to be exceptional circumstances so that the jail sentence could be suspended.

Isobel Delamare, for the prosecution, told the hearing that on Sunday, 27 May, Marshall, one of four daughters, had crushed 45 sleeping tablets into her mother's food and drink and then given it to her.

Mrs Maxwell became unconscious but survived. Marshall told police later: "I just wanted her to sleep and be out of her misery. I'm not sorry. The only thing I am sorry about is that it didn't work."

Piers Reed, for the defence, said Marshall had watched her second husband die a "protracted and painful death" from cancer and could no longer bear to watch her mother suffer. He said the attempt "was not done through malice, it was done through love".