Homicide by Necessity - The Lifeboat Case.

A question that has rarely been discussed in Indian courts and legislature is whether a person can be excused for committing a murder compelled by necessity, but has significant importance in English Law. Let's begin with a story.

On 5th July, 1884, four Englishmen Thomas Dudley, Edward Stephens, Edmund Brooks and 17-year old cabin boy, Richard Thomas Parker, all able-bodied English seamen, were cast away in a storm on the high seas 1600 miles from the Cape of Good Hope were compelled to put into an open boat belonging to an English yacht. In this boat they had very less food and water. On twelth day, after consuming all the food available to them they had nothing to eat. The boat was probably more than 1000 miles away from land. On 24th of July, Dudley and Stephens spoke of their having families, and suggested it would be better to kill the boy(Parker) that their lives should be saved, and Dudley proposed that if there was no vessel in sight by the tomorrow morning, the boy should be killed. Next day, the 25th of July, no vessel appearing, Dudley told Brooks that he had better go and have a sleep, and made signs to Stephens and Brooks that the boy had better be killed. Stephens agreed to the act, but Brooks dissented from it. The boy was then lying at the bottom of the boat quite helpless, and extremely weakened by famine and by drinking sea water, and unable to make any resistance, nor did he ever assent to his being killed. Dudley offered a prayer asking forgiveness for them all if either of them should be tempted to commit a rash act, and that their souls might be saved. Dudley, with the assent of Stephens, went to the boy, and telling him that his time was come, put a knife into his throat and killed him then and there, the three men fed upon the body and blood of the boy for four days. On the fourth day after the act had been committed the boat was picked up by a passing vessel, and they were rescued, still alive, but in the lowest state of prostration. They were carried to the port of Falmouth, and committed for trial at Exeter. 

The above-discussed story is a true event and popularly known as "Lifeboat Case"(The Queen vs Dudley and Stephens, 1884). Question involved in this case was, whether Dudley and Stephens in killing Parker were guilty of murder and it was defended by saying  that they were not guilty of murder since they killed him under the pressure of necessity. Necessity will excuse an act which would otherwise be a crime. In this case, Lord Coleridge, CJ, observed and held that, the prisoners put to death a weak and unoffending boy upon the chance of preserving their own lives by feeding upon his flesh and blood after he was killed, and with the certainty of depriving him, of any possible chance of survival. The verdict finds in terms that "if the men had not fed upon the body of the boy they would probably not have survived," and that “the boy being in a much weaker condition was likely to have died before them." They might possibly have been picked up next day by a passing ship; they might possibly not have been picked up at all; in either case it is obvious that the killing of the boy would have been an unnecessary and profitless act. 

Further, it is admitted that the deliberate killing of this unoffending and unresisting boy was clearly murder, unless the killing can be justified by some well-recognised excuse admitted by the law. It is further admitted that there was in this case no such excuse, unless the killing was justified by what has been called “necessity.” But the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity. Nor is this to be regretted. Though law and morality are not the same, and many things may be immoral which are not necessarily illegal, yet the absolute divorce of law from morality would be of fatal consequence; and such divorce would follow if the temptation to murder in this case were to be held by law an absolute defence of it. It is not so. 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. The duty, in case of shipwreck, of a captain to his crew, of the crew to the passengers, of soldiers to women and children, as in the noble case of the Birkenhead; these duties impose on men the moral necessity, not of the preservation, but of the sacrifice of their lives for others from which in no country, least of all, it is to be hoped, in England, will men ever shrink, as indeed, they have not shrunk. It is not correct, therefore, to say that there is any absolute or unqualified necessity to preserve one's life. "Necesse est ut eam, non ut vivam," is a saying of a Roman officer quoted by Lord Bacon himself with high eulogy in the very chapter on necessity to which so much reference has been made. It would be a very easy and cheap display of commonplace learning to quote from Greek and Latin authors, from Horace, from Juvenal, from Cicero, from Euripides, passage after passage, in which the duty of dying for others has been laid down in glowing and emphatic language as resulting from the principles of heathen ethics; it is enough in a Christian country to remind ourselves of the Great Example whom we profess to follow. It is not needful to point out the awful danger of admitting the principle which has been contended for. Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity? By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength, or intellect, or 'what? It is plain that the principle leaves to him who is to profit by it to determine the necessity which will justify him in deliberately taking another's life to save his own. In this case the weakest, the youngest, the most unresisting, was chosen. Was it more necessary to kill him than one of the grown men? The answer must be "No". 

A man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime. It is therefore our duty to declare that the prisoners' act in this case was wilful murder, that the facts as stated in the verdict are no legal justification of the homicide; and to say that in our unanimous opinion the prisoners are upon this special verdict guilty of murder. 

[Note - The Court had passed sentence of death upon prisoners but this sentence was afterwards commuted by the crown to six months imprisonment.]