Murder for “Necessity”?. The case of the Queen v. Dudley &…
By: Devinka Lukito
Tags: Criminal Justice, Justice, Case, Legal

Wrestling with dilemmas sheds light on the way moral argument proceed in our personal lives and in the public square. Life in democratic societies is rife with disagreement about right and wrong, justice and injustice. The case of the Queen v. Dudley and Stephens indicates the intensity of our morality on “what shall be done?”

Four shipwrecked men, lost at sea on a small rowboat with no food or water became the perfect legal storm and, ultimately, a watershed moment on how far man can go with justifying murder of one for the sake of many in the name of necessity. Parker’s (victim) situation was showing an appearance of imminent death as he gave way to temptation and drank the seawater. Dudley ( defendant) proposed to Stephens (defendant) to draw lots on who should be put to death to save the rest, and that they afterwards thought it would be better to kill the boy that their lives should be saved. But the question is, “What is a justified murder?”, “ Is it a murder with consent?” or “ Why does an act of consent make such a moral difference that an act would be wrong, taking a life without consent is morally permissible with consent?”.

Dudley’s evidence: “No vessel appearing on the morning, I made signs to Stephens and Brooks that we had better do it, but they seemed to have no heart to do it, so I went to the boy, who was lying at the bottom of the boat with his arm over his face. “I took out my knife-first offering a prayer to God to forgive us for what we were about to do and for the rash act, that our souls might be saved-and I said to the boy, ‘Richard, your time has come.’ The boy said, ‘What me, Sir?’ I said, ‘Yes, my boy.’ “I then put my knife [into the side of his neck.] The blood spurted out, and we caught it in the bailer and we drank the blood while it was warm; we then stripped the body, cut it open, and took out his liver and heart, and we ate the liver while it was still warm. Stephens at that time was in the stern of the boat and Brooks in the bow?” It was a terrible scene when later described by the survivors. “Mad wolves”, they described themselves: “We could not have our right reason.”

The verdict of the court was homicide by any definition. Dudley and Stephens were indicted of murder for the murder of Richard Parker on the high seas on the 25th of July in the present year. This proved that both prisoners were subject to terrible temptation which tends to be immoral and opposed to all legal principle and analogy.

Lord Hale regarded the private necessity which justified, and alone justified, the taking the life of another for the safeguard of one’s own to be what is commonly called “self-defence.”

Here comes the main question of the issue: Is “necessity” a reasonable defence for murder?

Taking look on the case, much of the prevailing authority at the time spoke of necessity as “self-defence”. Taking one’s life to safeguard your own. Although, Dudley and Stephens claimed the defence of justifiable homicide, what needed to be put in question was “How would you rule?”

Permitting such a defence to be asserted raises poignant questions such as how does one measure the comparative values of lives and who decides such things. I must say that necessity as a “survival” is used as an excuse to eliminate one’s reason of their temptation without thinking the rights of the victim. It must no be supposed that in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse for crime it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was; how awful the suffering; how hard in such trials to keep the judgement straight and the conduct pure.

A man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of “crime”.

The court rejected war as an appropriate analogy for Dudley and Stephen’s situation. War is a service imposed upon people by the nation. This was a private homicide to achieve a private end, the saving of their own skins. Dudley and Stephens urged the court to accept that they had a duty to preserve their own lives, but the court rejected this as well. True, without the killing of Richard Parker, the other men might have died, but turning the sailors’ war analogy against them, the court stated, “To preserve one’s life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it. War is full of instances in which it is a man’s duty not to live, but to die.” Dudley and Stephen’s killing of Richard Parker was not, in the court’s words, “devilish.” They were honest men, who, when driven to an extreme, gave in to a temptation that, if we are honest with ourselves, we would be hard pressed to say for certain that we would be able to resist. But if the law were to allow people to kill for their private benefit when they feel that extreme necessity compels it, the door would swing wide open to the dangers of “unbridled passion and atrocious crime.”

That was not self-defence, but murder, no matter how extreme the circumstances they faced when they made their fatal choice. The verdict was guilty. The men would have to pay for their crime.

This case was taken as an example of ethical dilemma known as “trolley problem”. If you were put in their situation, what would you do? Would you sacrifice one piece to save three others, or would you gamble all four on a hope — no matter how remote or unlikely that hope might be?