Lots of Cases!

I've started doing a little reading of cases in preparation for law school (and, I admit, somewhat out of enjoyment of going back to my Philosophy of Law class and looking over the more interesting scenarios we covered). While I'm sure there will be much to hate about 3 years of law school, I think one consistent silver lining is that a good portion of what we'll read are opinions, meaning you get an interesting anecdote for most concepts you study. And in that vein, I thought I'd share an interesting case I just read, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens. Fair warning: this is a pretty creepy case.

The Case:
You can read the full background at that link I posted, but here's the basics: three men, Dudley, Stephens and and Brooks, along with a younger boy, Richard Parker, were sailing some kind of a boat, which was destroyed by a minor weather occurrence thousands of miles away from land. The four of them piled into a very small life raft with only two tinfuls of turnips and no fresh water. From July 7th to July 23rd of that year (1884), the four had almost nothing to drink or eat, and were near death. After some discussion between the three men, Dudley and Stephens decided that the boy, who was likely the most weakened of all four, would have to be killed in order to save the others. Brooks did not agree to the plan (which explains why he was not a co-defendant), and in the early morning of July 24th, Dudley held down the boy while Stephens stuck his penknife into the boy's jugular vein, killing him. On July 29th, the three men were found by another boat after subsisting on the boy's remains for nearly a week. After a long & involved legal process, Dudley and Stephens charged with first-degree murder and convicted.

Eventually the Queen's Bench, which is some kind of appellate court in England (possibly the highest court--I don't really know), heard the case and ruled that there was no excuse of necessity, that Dudley and Stephens were guilty of murder, and that they were therefore sentenced to death.

My Thoughts:
I think the court was clearly right in ruling that the excuse of necessity doesn't apply here, because of one very important fact of the case: the three men never consulted with Parker and decided, without his input, that he would be the one to die. In similar cases (yes, this has happened more than once) where the survivors drew lots to determine who should be killed, there was a legitimate excuse, which was recognized by courts. But for a person to decide to save himself by killing the weakest person, and to do it without even talking to the victim, is clearly murder.

But there's still a question of whether, in cases where a person must kill in order to save himself, the individual ought to be punished. Especially difficult in this case was the fact that all four men were slowly starving death over several weeks, with no realistic hope of survival except to commit a terrible crime; I think it would be hard to seriously condemn someone who made the wrong choice.

The court, by the way, agreed that a lesser punishment was appropriate: it wrote, "...if in any case the law appears to be too severe on individuals, to leave it to the Sovereign to exercise that prerogative of mercy which the Constitution has intrusted to the hands fittest to dispense it."

Dudley & Stephens were sentenced to 6 months imprisonment and then released.