A FORMER prison officer who helped her lesbian lover to die, acted out of compassion for her terminally ill partner, a judge ruled yesterday.
Patricia Mulpeter, originally from Glasgow, agreed to help Kaija Savolainen take her own life to end the pain of her alcohol-related liver damage.
Plymouth Crown Court heard that Ms Savolainen was asphyxiated after she taped her own mouth and nose
closed.
Mulpeter, 48, from Streatham, London, then drove the 58-year-old's body to a police station in Devon and told officers that her partner was lying dead in the car outside.
But Mr Justice Owen, the judge who heard the case, said that Mulpeter deserved "compassion and not punishment".
The couple, who were together for more than 30 years, drew up a suicide pact after Ms Savolainen, originally from Finland, was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver in July 2007 and given just six months to live. The pair embarked on a number of failed suicide bids together, including an attempt at carbon monoxide poisoning using a car exhaust, after taking out a £10,000 bank loan last summer and hiring a car to go on holiday in the south of England.
By October 2007 they were £2,000 overdrawn, and on 7 October Savolainen took her own life using five pieces of adhesive tape to form a "mask'' over her lower face, nose and mouth.
Mulpeter drove their hire car to a police station in Tavistock, Devon, and handed herself in.
She had been charged with murder, but yesterday the prosecution accepted her guilty plea to one count of aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring suicide. The court was told she had not played an active part in the death, but had offered "morale support" in a "final act of love".
A suicide note left inside their hired Vauxhall Astra read: "I have asked and begged Patricia to assist me to take my life, as I cannot do it by myself.
"My health has deteriorated. I have spent weeks in hospital recently and I cannot take it any more.
"Please, please help me. I love you and I always have."
Prosecuting barrister Martin Edmunds, QC, told the court the couple had "a close and loving relationship", but doctors believed Ms Savolainen, who was 58, had only between six months and a year left to live if she had continued to drink.
He said the body was found with tape around her face and that she had died of asphyxiation.
The court heard that a post-mortem examination showed there were no signs of a struggle and tests proved the note was written by Ms Savolainen.
Sarah Munro, Mulpeter's defence QC, said the couple had the most "adoring relationship". She added : "What Savolainen says in the note gives the truth of what this case is about. She needed the defendant there, but there isn't a shred of evidence of any active participation on the defendant's part.
"We would submit that this is a final act of love, rather than any criminal act. After meeting Kaija when she was aged 25, they were in a most adoring relationship for over 30 years to the exclusion of the outside world.''
Sentencing Mulpeter to six months in prison, suspended for one year, the judge said it was clear she had given morale support "borne from compassion". He added: "Yours was a loving relationship. I accept that you acted out of love.
"Euthanasia has been the subject of much debate, but in this jurisdiction to aid another to suicide, albeit only in encouragement, remains a serious criminal offence, and it is in my judgment an offence that must be marked by a sentence of imprisonment, but I will suspend that sentence."
Ms Mulpeter was ordered to remain at her bail address in Hereford for the next three months.
The full article contains 651 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
