People are murdering their partners and claiming they are assisted suicides - should we be surprised?

Australian woman Natasha Darcy is currently on trial in Sydney for the 2017 murder of her former partner Mathew Dunbar.

Prosecutors allege that Darcy murdered Dunbar to gain control of his $3.5M dollar estate, and that she used the techniques advocated by euthanasia campaigners to make the murder look like an assisted suicide.

Dunbar was found with a plastic bag over his head that had been attached to a helium gas bottle - the exact method of suicide long advocated by Australian euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke.

Evidence presented during the trial shows that Darcy spent months online researching methods of both murder and suicide, even typing in questions such as "can police see websites you visit”. 

If this does turn out to be a case of homicide by assisted suicide it will sadly be another in the growing list of such incidents.

Just two years ago Australian man Graham Morant was found guilty and sentenced to prison for convincing and providing practical assistance to his wife to commit suicide at their home while he was out at church one Sunday morning.

In both of these cases the accused stood to reap a significant financial windfall from the death of their partner, in both cases the victims had suffered depression, and in both cases the accused claimed it was a case of compassionate assisted suicide.

These cases might seem extreme, but in reality they actually highlight the deadly risks that vulnerable members of the New Zealand community must grapple with now that euthanasia and assisted suicide have been legalised here.

Just consider the comments from the Judge in the case of Graham Morant when describing the way Morant had treated his wife:

“You took advantage of those vulnerabilities in order to persuade her to kill herself and then assisted her to do so once she had made that decision.”

The frightening thing about that statement is that it could just as easily apply to a state sanctioned assisted suicide or euthanasia without anyone ever knowing the truth.

The so-called legal safeguards against coercion in the New Zealand euthanasia law are so woefully inadequate that this very thing could easily occur on a regular basis without any detection.

Even if such an indecent was discovered after the fact, not only would it be too late for the victim, but, most shockingly of all, the New Zealand state and medical establishment would have been party to the killing.

This isn’t baseless scaremongering. 

The New Zealand euthanasia law simply requires that a single doctor “do their best” (whatever that means) to detect coercion, and they are only permitted to consult with people that the patient allows them to speak to as part of this process.

In the case of Graham Morant, that would have been as simple as him convincing his wife to tell the doctor that he was the only person they could speak to about whether there was any coercion.

He of course would then deny there was any pressure, which would clear the way for the deadly dose to be approved and administered to end the life of his vulnerable wife.

Convincing her to engage in the smaller act of lying to the doctor hardly seems like a stretch when you consider that Morant had already convinced his wife to do the ultimate harm to herself.

Yes, there will be instances where glaring red flags would prevent this sort of blatantly coerced killing, but in a not-insignificant number of cases it will be far too easy for predators to evade detection.

This problem is also one that can never be solved as long as euthanasia and assisted suicide remain legal.

At best it can only ever be lessened by increasing the legal safeguards, as this is a fatal flaw that is always inherent in every legalised euthanasia regime.

There is simply no way to stop a nefarious actor who is determined to exploit the system in order to procure such an outcome.

When you establish a new societal more which institutionalises, normalises and glamourises assisted suicide and euthanasia, people stop caring and become far less alert to the serious danger of coercion that this entails for the vulnerable.

Even when cases of coercion are exposed - unless the evidence is incontrovertible or the victim has somehow miraculously escaped and is able to speak out publicly - the perpetrator still has the advantage of operating in a society so desensitised to euthanasia that the outcome could still easily swing in a favourable direction for them.

When you strip away all the dishonest euphemisms, these are the stark realities of legalised euthanasia and assisted suicide - and they are the very realities that will plague Aoteoroa from November onwards.