London, England, Nov 21, 2017 / 03:01 am
An English chemist charged with murder for the 2015 killing of his 85-year-old father, who wished to die, was freed on Friday by a judge who said, "Your acts of assistance were acts of pure compassion and mercy."
Bipin Desai, 58, was also charged with assisted suicide and two counts of theft. Desai gave his father, Dhirajlal Desai, a smoothie laced with stolen morphine at his home in Surrey on Aug. 26, 2015. Desai soon after injected his father with insulin to speed the morphine's fatal action.
The judge ruled Nov. 17 that because Dhirajlal Desai wished to die, there was no basis for a murder conviction.
Dr. Anthony McCarthy of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children responded to the ruling asking, "Are we now to believe that the killing of an innocent and vulnerable human being who is 'tired of life' is not to be regarded as any serious crime?"