London, January 23: The woman convicted of murdering her brain-damaged son by injecting him with a lethal dose of heroin insisted she had done no wrong.
The Times of London reported Francis Inglis saying, “I am not a murderer, and I do not regret what I did, not at all.”
In an emotional telephone conversation, Inglis’ family told her they supported her decision to end the suffering of her son Thomas, 22, who suffered severe head injuries after falling from an ambulance.
“You only did it because you knew we wouldn’t,” said Pat Kershaw, her sister.
Inglis, 57, set out to kill her son, and when she failed the first time, she went to extreme lengths to ensure he would not survive the second.
She was found guilty of murder and attempted murder at the Old Bailey on January 20.
Her sentence, at least nine years in prison, reignited the debate over “mercy killing.”
Her son was not terminally ill and, in his vegetative state, he had never been able to communicate his own wishes.
Questions remain over how and why he managed to get out of the moving ambulance.
He had been on his way to hospital with a cut lip after being caught up in a drunken fight. While the family were grief-stricken, they said Inglis was “hysterical.”
They blamed a senior doctor for giving them false hope with what they believed was an overly optimistic prognosis.
Inglis researched on the internet how many grams of heroin would be needed. Within 10 days of the accident, she approached a neighbour, asking where she could buy heroin.
Fourteen months after the accident, she barricaded herself in his room and delivered the lethal dose.
Her family called for a review of the law, urging the legalisation of lethal injections.
Inglis, they claim, sacrificed herself to end her son’s life in the most humane way possible.
They were not prepared to apply to the court to withdraw food and drink from Thomas.
“If a vet let a dog die like that, he would be reported to the RSPCA. I wasn’t going to spend 35, 40 days, watching my son shrivel,” his father said.
—Agencies