Lesley Martin packs bag for jail

By JAMES GARDINER

Euthanasia campaigner Lesley Martin has packed a bag in expectation she will be sent to jail today.

"If you expect the worst, anything less is a bonus," Martin said yesterday.

The 40-year-old mother of two was found guilty last month of attempting to murder her terminally-ill mother, Joy, and will be sentenced in the High Court at Wanganui.

No conviction was entered at the conclusion of the trial after her lawyer, Dr Donald Stevens, QC, said he would seek a discharge without conviction.

A jury found Martin guilty of attempting to murder Joy five years ago by administering an overdose of morphine but not guilty of attempting to murder by suffocation with a pillow.

The trial heard considerable evidence about the suffering of Joy Martin in her final months of cancer, which spread from her bowel to her liver and serious infections associated with her surgery.

There were failures in the medical system and Lesley Martin, an experienced registered nurse, was under stress as she tried to care for her mother at home, mostly on her own.

But it was only after Martin published a book about what happened that police decided to charge her. The book, To Die Like a Dog, became the trial's prime exhibit.

Speaking from her New Plymouth home yesterday, she said she was preparing for the worst - a minimum of a month in Arohata Women's Prison at Tawa before she could lodge an appeal and apply for bail.

The Probation Service pre-sentence report recommended imprisonment, she said, "because of my lack of remorse and my unswerving conviction that I'm not a criminal".

But a second report had backed away from that and made no recommendation on sentence.

"So it's really landed fairly in the lap of the judge."

Crown prosecutor Andrew Cameron would not say before the hearing what sentence he would seek.

But the fact he opposed bail after the guilty verdict was seen as a clear indication that he will argue for a custodial sentence.

He also opposed Dr Stevens' application that no conviction be entered at that time but Justice John Wild granted both applications and commended Martin on the way she had conducted herself during the 2 1/2-week trial.

"This is unjust," she called out from the dock after the judge had left the courtroom.

Opposition justice spokesman Richard Worth said it was a difficult to establish the correct sentence.

"She clearly thought what she was doing was appropriate but society can't countenance under the present law the taking of life."

He said there was a danger in sending to the community a signal that in some circumstances it was acceptable to break the law.

A specialist in sentencing at Otago University's law faculty, Associate Professor Geoff Hall, said he doubted Martin would escape without conviction or some form of penalty.

"Something between prison and a discharge seems likely," he said. "Something like community service."

Martin said she had no money to pay a fine and her lawyer had commented that she had been doing community service for the past three years with her campaign to raise public awareness about voluntary euthanasia and problems with the current law.

Professor Hall said a jail term of two years or less would enable Martin to apply for home detention but she said she would not apply.

"I refuse to have my home be my prison."

Martin said she expected Mr Cameron's submissions would cover statements she had made publicly since the trial.

Martin said she had no previous criminal record, just some speeding tickets.

Many people had joined Exit NZ, the organisation she formed to advocate law change. She has asked supporters to gather outside police stations this morning to show their concern about the law.

She urged them not to be disruptive or waste police time by trying to register complaints.

"This is a legal issue but police don't make the law."

The Law case

* In August 2002 Rex Law, 77, of Thames was jailed for 18 months after admitting murdering his wife Olga five months earlier.

* Law, freed in May last year, said he hit his wife's head with a mallet and smothered her with a pillow because of a pact between them. She suffered from Alzheimer's.

* He was the first convicted murderer to escape a life sentence under the 2002 Sentencing Act.

* In that case the Crown argued there was no evidence of the pact apart from Law's claim.

* Similarly Lesley Martin wrote of a promise she made to her mother Joy, but neither she nor Joy told anyone else about it before Joy's death.