The Price of Mercy: A fight for the right to die with dignity

By Sean Davison

In 2018 Professor Sean Davison's world is shattered. Arrested for the murder of Dr Anrich Burger, Davison finds himself locked up in prison. An additional two murders are added to the case. He now faces a mandatory life prison sentence. The Price of Mercy tracks the extraordinary journey that Davison embarks on to prepare for his gruelling legal challenge. He remains  unwavering in his belief that we all have the right to die with dignity. A book that will change the way you see death.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melinda Ferguson Books
• Release date: Jun 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781990973512

Sean Davison

Sean Davison is a Professor in the Dept of Biotechnology at UWC. In 2010 he was arrested for murder in New Zealand after helping his gravely ill mother die. He served 5 months house arrest. In 2012 he founded pro-euthanasia, DignitySA. Since June 2019, he's been under house arrest for the murder of Dr Anrich Burger, and two other assisted suicides.   

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

THE ARREST

Wednesday, 19 September 2018

The past 48 hours have been the most harrowing of my life. I’ve been incarcerated in a prison cell in Cape Town, South Africa, charged with the premeditated murder of Dr Anrich Burger who died five years ago, in 2013.

Premeditated murder! A charge that carries a minimum life sentence.

When they arrested me yesterday morning, I had been confident, with a clear conscience, that I had not committed a crime, that bail would be granted. Yet the detective in charge had no qualms about clinically informing me that the prosecution would be opposing my bail request in court the following day.

In the eyes of the law, I will be seen as a repeat offender. In 2011, I was convicted of assisting my terminally ill mother to die in New Zealand. It was extremely probable that the prosecution would insinuate that I hadn’t learned from my past crime and that I must now be refused bail and kept behind bars.

A few months earlier, I had received an email from a detective asking me to pay him a visit at the Sea Point police station. At the time, I assumed that it had something to do with the DNA forensics work my lab does for the police. I responded that I was visiting Australia, and I’d let him know when I was next in town, which I subsequently did. In retrospect, I don’t understand why they waited for me to come to them; why didn’t they simply arrest me at my home or at the airport on my arrival? Surely the police must have ways of knowing when a person enters and exits the country?

Yesterday I still had no idea what lay before me when I entered the Sea Point police station. I went cold with shock when I was ushered into a room and immediately charged with murder. I was photographed and fingerprinted, my saliva was taken for DNA profiling. When I asked whether I could make a phone call, the detective threw a jab of sarcasm my way. This isn’t an American movie – you can make calls until we take your phone.

Trying hard not to panic, I hurriedly called DignitySA’s administrator, Lee Last, and briefly explained what had happened. DignitySA is the organisation seeking a change to the law on assisted dying. Lee called back a few minutes later to say she had instructed a lawyer in Cape Town and he was already on his way to see me. That gave me an inch of relief.

I then phoned my wife Raine in Australia on a WhatsApp video call. The detectives watched in the background. Raine kept very calm, as she is so expert at doing in crisis situations, but in truth, she must have been terrified. I heard Fia, our four-year old daughter, playing in the room, and felt a sudden, overwhelming need to see the innocence and joy of her face. Yet, as Raine turned to get her, I realised that I didn’t want her to have a memory of seeing me in police custody.

Raine and I communicated in a matter-of-fact way, fully aware of the police detective’s presence. I stressed the fact that if I didn’t get bail, this could be our last conversation until she returned to South Africa. Under the orderly words that were exchanged between us was a deep chasm of helplessness and fear.

Before we had finished our conversation, a middle-aged man in a suit entered the room. He told the detectives that he was my lawyer. Without having the chance to greet him myself, I immediately introduced him to Raine over the video link – I instinctively knew that he might become Raine’s only connection to me if things went really badly and I wasn’t released on bail.

Once the call with Raine ended, the lawyer introduced himself as Josua Greeff, from Mathewson Gess Attorneys; he seemed methodical, unpretentious and down to earth. He explained that DignitySA had given him little background on what was going on. I did get the feeling that he wasn’t particularly keen to be here, which wasn’t exactly encouraging. But my mind kept whirring. The implications for Raine and the kids were devastating. My family and I had moved to the small city of Wollongong, Australia, at the beginning of this year, 2018. I had decided to take a sabbatical from my work at the University of the Western Cape and we had thought that this would be a wonderful opportunity to explore the option of emigrating. The kids loved their school in Wollongong. Everything had felt so positive that we’d been preparing to take the final steps to make the move permanent. During this time I’d been commuting to South Africa to carry out work commitments, and to attend a conference in Cape Town.

My thoughts were disrupted as the police handcuffed me and I was led to a waiting police vehicle. I was informed that they had a search warrant for my house in Pinelands. I stared out the window as we drove, trying to conceal the fear and dread that now consumed me.

We stood outside my property for some time before entering. It wasn’t the house that had been rented out to tenants that concerned me, but the garage that had been converted into a small flatlet. This was where I stayed and where my laptop sat perched on a desk, housing a litany of potentially damaging evidence. I was even more concerned about a bottle of Nembutal, the drug used for euthanasia that was easily visible when opening the bedroom cupboard; the discovery of this could destroy any chance I had of securing bail.

By now I was sweating. I tried hard to avoid looking towards the flatlet.

The officers now prepared themselves to enter the main house, pulling on gloves, hauling out clipboards and pens, and arming themselves with cameras to record the search. Suddenly one of the arresting detectives stared at the flatlet, puzzled. I felt my pulse quicken. I desperately attempted to distract him.

It’s going to rain, I said, trying to sound calm.

No, I doubt it, he said, looking up at the threatening sky. He busied himself with his camera. I breathed again. It seemed to have worked.

Six detectives then entered the house. I was instructed to follow them as they moved from room to room. They combed through every corner, every cupboard, drawer and rubbish bin. Meticulous in their quest, they zoned into anything that looked vaguely like a drug. They pounced upon my tenants’ medications and dog powder, all of which were carefully sealed in labelled plastic bags to be despatched to the police lab. Then they seized all the computers, cameras and phones the tenants had in the house, clearly assuming that they were mine. They first lined them all up on the dining-room table so that I could confirm the seizure, and sign next to each one that was entered on a list.

Even though they tried not to leave the house in a mess, the place looked a bit roughed up by the time they were done. I imagined the tenants returning after work and thinking that they had been burgled.

Once the house had been searched, I was struck by renewed panic as we walked past the garage flatlet. I avoided looking in that direction, conscious of trying not to give anything away through my body language. Again, the same detective stopped and stared at it. It certainly had the appearance of accommodation with a large glass sliding door, windows, and closed curtains. My heart picked up speed. They had a search warrant to search the entire property so I was certain that this was next.

Again, I went for the distraction technique.

I still think rain is coming.

Maybe, but not soon. The policeman sounded unconvinced. To my immense relief, we made our way right past the flatlet, got back into the police vehicle and left.

*

Back at the police station, I was led straight to a bare holding cell. Now I was truly trapped, enveloped in a dark hole from which there was no escape. Although it was already mid-September, the month of spring, it was freezing inside the cell. The wind whistled through the windows on either side of the cell, leading straight to the outside. There was neither a bed, nor a mattress, just a concrete bench to sit or lie on. On entering, I was given two threadbare blankets. A toilet bowl stood in one corner and a basin with a single tap in another. Over the next interminable hours, I endlessly paced up and down, trying to drive the extreme fear of a prison sentence out of my head. I couldn’t imagine the horror of spending time in jail. I have always lived for the outdoors. I go for mountain hikes most days. Just the thought of being confined to four walls in a tiny cell day after day was like hell on earth.

Later the guard brought me dinner: two brown-bread sandwiches, each with a smear of jam. Both the bread and the jam tasted stale.

It was hard to keep track of time. I was unsure of how many hours had passed but I guessed it was around 7pm. I truly began to understand the reality of claustrophobia. I had felt it earlier, when they had cuffed me and driven me to my house with the heater in the police vehicle turned up full blast. It had been so hot that I was desperate to get my jersey off but had been unable to.

I looked down at my shoes. Before I was locked in this cell my belt and shoelaces were taken. A few minutes later one of the detectives had returned and said he needed to check that I wasn’t still wearing my belt. I assured him it had been removed, while at the same time lifting my jersey to show him clearly that there was no belt holding up my trousers. He told me to turn around because he wanted to check from behind. As I turned, he grabbed my buttocks, squeezed hard and burst out laughing, then walked away, locking the door. Intentional humiliation? On a bigger scale, it seemed like minor sexual harassment, but it was still traumatic, corrupt and weird on top of everything else.

*

I sit on the cold floor. My mind can’t stop spinning. Sleep seems like an impossibility. I can’t believe that just 10 hours earlier I had been making my final preparations to fly back to Australia to rejoin my family. I had only ever intended to be in Cape Town for two short weeks to attend a conference, but now, in what felt like a split second, I am suddenly trapped and facing a lengthy jail sentence.

My heart aches at the thought of my three young children back in Australia, 11 000 kilometres away. How will they cope without me? How will I cope without them?

As the night drags on, my fears intensify.

What if I am imprisoned, will I be sacked from my job? The last time I was arrested in New Zealand in 2010, for my mother’s death, my university had backed me. I was seen as a man who had committed a difficult act of compassion, which fitted with the university’s humanitarian principles. With new senior management at the university, and me committing the same crime again, would they still stand by me?

What if the police realised that there was a flatlet on my property and went back to do another search after they had locked me in the cell? And what if they discovered that the computers they seized were not mine, but the tenants’?

Why didn’t they arrest me five years ago, at the time of Anrich Burger’s death? And why not at the airport as soon as I arrived back in the country? Perhaps they had been waiting for the conference I attended last week. I was chairing the biennial conference of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies in Cape Town and the police must have been monitoring it, hoping I would say something incriminating in my presentations.

What would the World Federation do with its president arrested for going beyond the law, to help someone to die? Although our organisation comprises members from 52 countries, united in our campaign to change the laws on euthanasia, how would they feel about me taking the law into my own hands? I was elected president at the conference in Amsterdam in 2016, and had just been re-elected for another two years at the Cape Town convention.

Pacing up and down that tiny, dank prison cell, it is agonising to realise that this horror is only the beginning.

CHAPTER 2

DR ANRICH BURGER

The night seems to drag on forever.

I eventually find a way to block out the all-night lights, making a little tent by tying two corners of one blanket to the bars of the prison door and tucking the other two corners under my body as I lie on the floor. I can’t move much because the blanket isn’t tightly secured but I am too anxious to sleep anyway. I try to piece together how my arrest had come about. I think of Anrich Burger.

I returned to South Africa in May 2012, having finished my five months’ sentence of house arrest in New Zealand, for my mother’s assisted suicide. It was around this time that Dr Anrich Burger first contacted me. Initially, it seemed that he simply wanted to show his support for DignitySA, and our organisation’s goal to change the law.

Anrich lived on a well-to-do country estate close to Paarl – a spacious complex with fields and streams, a gym, entertainment area, tennis courts and a pool. It was, and still is, a safe haven for the wealthy.

He and I immediately took a liking to each other and quickly formed the basis of what would become a deep friendship spanning the next two years. He was a gentle, kind, unassuming and highly intelligent man.

Anrich lived with Jill, whom he introduced to me as his fiancé. Prior to his accident, Jill had been a lodger in his flatlet in Somerset West. After the tragedy, she became his part-time carer before the two became romantically involved. Some of Anrich’s friends believed she was a gold-digging chancer, but Anrich certainly appeared to love her.

On one visit, Anrich told me about the car accident that had caused his quadriplegia. Eight years earlier, at the age of 34, he was on holiday with a friend in Botswana when their car veered off the road at relatively low speed and rolled onto its roof. The flipping of the vehicle turned Anrich onto his head, breaking two little bones in his neck. The accident destroyed life as he knew it. He lost the use of his arms and legs forever.

At the time, he was a young man with a promising life ahead of him, a brilliant medical doctor, training in acute and emergency medicine. He was strong and fit, with a passion for the outdoors and a love of water skiing, speed-boating and mountain biking. He had played rugby in Craven Week.

His most endearing attribute was his kind nature and his ability to look for the good in everyone. Anrich was still trying to see hope and optimism, even from his own impossible position.

Whenever I was visiting, a full-time caregiver would regularly pop in to the room to hold a bottle of water for Anrich to drink from with a straw, or to wipe his nose when he had a cold, or to administer morphine drops for pain relief. He had lost all control and autonomy over his life.

As time went by, I visited more often. I would push him around the estate in his wheelchair while we had fascinating discussions, navigating a wide range of topics. Sometimes we would stop in the field and chat, and when we returned we would play chess.

We spoke almost daily on the phone. After a few months, our conversations began to conclude with him expressing his desire to die. The first time he mentioned this I was shocked – this didn’t match his cheerful, optimistic character. Outwardly, he seemed so full of life, plans and hope, yet inwardly he carried an incredible frustration at being denied the rights that able-bodied people take for granted. He said that it wasn’t fair that while most could choose to commit suicide, it was illegal to help someone who was not able to do so themselves. He strongly believed that the law discriminated against quadriplegics.

He had carefully rationalised why he wanted to die. It wasn’t some impulsive or emotional decision. The defining factors were indignity, neuropathic pain and fear of the future.

Anrich would occasionally describe to me some of his most undignified days. These often occurred when he was being taken somewhere for a special outing, and on the journey he would lose control of his bowels. Jill or his caregiver would have to clean him up before the trip could continue. He found such episodes excruciatingly embarrassing and a humiliating loss of his dignity.

No able-bodied person can comprehend the suffering of a quadriplegic, Sean, it’s impossible, he said on one visit. The layers of complexity are so many, it is very hard to know where to start. The easy things for people to relate to are toilet matters; most people can imagine the indignity and humiliation that comes with that.

He continued. My body is wracked with severe and uncontrollable pain. People who judge me harshly for wanting to die may say I should be able to live with the indignity, and just get on with it, but they can’t comprehend the pain. I can’t continue like this. The pain is insistent, nagging, and so sharp it stings. It makes me angry and mad because it never loses its freshness. If you were to stub your toe against a wall for instance, you just absorb the initial pain and then it fades. But with neuropathic pain, it’s just as sharp and intense every time, all the time, over and over. Sometimes it happens when I’m lying in bed and it’s like trying to fall asleep with someone sticking a needle into my joints. It’s like experiencing constant torture. There’s rarely a day I’m not in pain. It affects everything: my moods, my sleep. Some have it much worse than me, which I can’t bear to even imagine.

Is there anything you can take? My question felt hollow, as if I already knew the answer.

I’m a medical doctor, I know better than most quadriplegics what is available. I’ve tried everything, and nothing works. Whatever I try works for a bit, and then I have to take more and more to get the same relief. Then come all the side effects, and then it stops working. At present the only thing that gives me a little relief are the morphine drops. But they make my mind groggy, and I hate that. As time goes by, each of the complications I have will have a greater and more debilitating effect. The prospect of being a quadriplegic in my seventies or eighties is horrific. And there’s Jill too. She has suffered too much, and now she is losing it. Often she gets angry with me, even for things beyond my control, like losing control of my bowels when we go on an outing. This really hurts me, and it hurts me to see the burden I am to her. Also, she and my helper are often laughing and joking when they are lifting me and washing me. I know they are probably trying to lighten the moment, but this just adds to my suffering.

I tried to offer him a semblance of comfort.

You probably know the quote ‘While I breathe, I hope’. Don’t you hope that maybe there is a chance for a cure for spinal injuries? I asked.

Anrich sighed deeply.

"I agree, hope is a