Killing a Disabled Son Faintly Condemned by Court
Stories like this terrify the disability rights community--and with good reason. The message is that the lives of people with profound disabilities are of less value than those of others.
In this case, an Australian couple murdered their disabled son, Matthew Sutton, who was blind and developmentally disabled, and who faced losing his hearing. The motive was love, because the man faced profound difficulties and challenges and had been abused in a group home. But "love" is always the excuse when disabled children are killed by parents or siblings. And when this happens, the courts almost always look on murder as benign events and mete out no meaningful punishment. And note these points from the story:
No cause of death was established and Mr Sutton refused to reveal what took place. Before the couple confessed to police in 2005, listening devices in their home recorded Mr Sutton saying: "It's because there is no euthanasia".It is worth noting that Matthew couldn't "choose" to be killed, demonstrating a truth about how the drive for euthanasia as a "choice" for the terminally ill bleeds into using killing as an answer to other forms of human suffering. Also, the father's refusal to cooperate with police didn't matter to the judge. Had Matthew not been disabled, such obstructionism would count against a defendant.
We can sympathize with the terrible conundrum faced by the parents but we cannot countenance murder as an answer to significant difficulties. Doing so sends the insidious message that the value of the lives of people like Matthew matter less than those of others. Besides, opening the door to people killing their disabled children would open the door to parents putting themselves out of misery--and then claiming love as the motive.
Labels: Discrimination Against Disabled
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:42 AM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
What a horrible story. And if the surgery he was facing was going to do him net harm, shouldn't the focus have been on whether perhaps to reject the surgery and treat the infection in some other way instead of killing him? So, the surgery was going to harm him. So instead you guys killed him. Brilliant choice.
That's horrific. They obviously should have gone to jail. What sort of message does this send? "Kill your severely disabled kids. Everyone will feel sorry for you and hug you and there will be no penalties."
From a reader: "And one more thing, they didn't wait to see the outcome of the surgery in terms of whether he would actually lose his hearing,
though this was supposedly their big reason."
I'm suspicious of the claim that the authorities found no specific cause of death. I have more confidence than that in modern forensic science. I can't help thinking that everyone knew from the beginning that the parents had murdered him, knew they'd get off with a slap on the wrist, and therefore the details of his death weren't ferreted out. Maybe the police felt it was hopeless or pointless. But it would sound more vivid to say, "Mr. ____ smothered his son with a pillow" than just to say, "His mother sedated him and his father killed him" with no more specifics.
On the other hand, I may be doing the police an injustice, because the crime was prosecuted. So perhaps the whole blame does lie with the sympathetic judge.
Lydia:
Sometimes it really *is* hard (and sometimes next to impossible) to tell what the cause of death is, despite advanced forensic science, just because sometimes something is missing, blurred, or looks different than it should in the body. Not defending anything - the parents did evil to their son and deserved to be severely punished, IMHO - but I felt it necessary to point that out 'cause a lot of people suffer from "CSI Syndrome," where they think that everything should add up as tightly as it does on television - almost nobody has *all* the kinds of state-of-the-art technology that the various CSI teams have at their disposal to get results right away, and even with the advances we've made in forensics, there are still tons of things that we can't tell about a particular crime.
Like I said, the parents were evil to do this, so this isn't to excuse them.
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