There is nothing civilised about assisted dying

In March 2021, Graham Mansfield, a retired baggage handler, had agreed a mutual suicide pact with his 71-year-old wife, Dyanne, who had terminal cancer. He proceeded to slit his wife’s throat in their back garden, and then made a serious attempt to take his own life. When he woke up 12 hours later, he called the police in desperation. He pleaded with paramedics to let him die and admitted in his first 999 call that he had killed Dyanne.

Last week, 73-year-old Mansfield was cleared of murder, but found guilty of manslaughter, by a jury at Manchester Crown Court. The pair had been married for 40 years, and Mansfield told the court that he could not bear the thought of life without his wife. Though manslaughter can be punished with a maximum of life in prison, Mr Justice Goose imposed a two-year suspended sentence on Mansfield, ruling that the killing was ‘an act of love, of compassion, to end her suffering’.

Mansfield, his legal team and pro-assisted-suicide organisations, like Dignity in Dying and Humanists UK, are now using the case to argue that we in the UK need to legalise assisted dying.

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