The Quality of Mercy

When his two elder boys were asleep and his wife had gone to the cinema, George Ernest Johnson, 40, a major in the Royal Corps of Signals, carried his three-month-old son's cot into the kitchen of their home in Epsom, 14 miles west of London. Dipping his finger in tap water, Johnson made the sign of the cross on the baby's forehead and baptized him David Ernest James. Then Johnson took a flexible gas pipe, put it on the baby's pillow and turned on the gas. When he returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, the baby was dead. Johnson phoned his family physician, Dr. William Berridge: "I have murdered David."

Johnson, a one-legged veteran of World War II now on desk duty, loved David as much as he did his older sons. But David, with oblique eyes and clubbed fingers, was a mongoloid--born an idiot (thanks to some quirk of nature not yet understood). When Johnson pressed him, Dr. Berridge said David had little chance of learning anything more difficult than feeding himself and using the toilet, no chance of ever earning a living. Johnson wondered aloud, in his agony, what would happen to David when he and his wife were gone. What would this incubus do to the other boys? Dr. Berridge echoed the words of other physicians: "There is no cure." The words rang in Johnson's mind until he took mercy into his own hands.

Last week an assize court jury in Kingston took only ten minutes to find Johnson not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter. (The reduced charge is permissible under English law if the accused, at the time of the killing, was suffering from impaired mental responsibility.) The bench, like Johnson, took mercy into its own hands. Said bewigged Justice Slade: "No thinking person could feel other than the greatest sympathy for you. I accept that your terrible deed was done . . . solely to put your child out of its misery. But you knew you were breaking the law. I cannot pass over what you did, lest other people think they can do likewise."

The minimum sentence under the law, said Slade, is twelve months' imprisonment. That was what he imposed.

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