NOT GUILTY: Austen ‘in awe’ over case ruling
It was said that Susan Austen was damned in a dead woman’s diary but a jury yesterday decided Austen was not guilty of aiding a suicide.
The diary of Annemarie Treadwell had talked of how she turned to ‘‘Suzy’’, pro-euthanasia advocate Susan Austen, to help her source the barbiturate pentobarbitone from China.
When Treadwell, 77, died at her apartment in a Wellington retirement village in June 2016, it wasn’t just a letter to her daughter that was found. Treadwell’s diary – written with her arthritic hands – was also located nearby.
In the High Court at Wellington yesterday, Austen’s supporters gave a collective gasp of relief as she was found not guilty of aiding Treadwell’s suicide.
Austen later said she had been in awe when she heard the verdict.
She was found guilty of two charges of specific importations of pentobarbitone. One was brought back to New Zealand personally in a box with a fascinator headpiece from Hong Kong in September 2016, and the other was a courier importation in March 2016, organised by Austen allegedly for Treadwell.
A not guilty verdict was delivered on a charge alleging repeated importations spanning about four years.
Austen’s lawyer asked for no convictions to be entered on the two guilty verdicts. Donald Stevens, QC, said in Australia importers of pentobarbitone were not convicted.
Austen was remanded on bail to be sentenced on May 11.
The judge, Justice Susan Thomas, told the jury that to find Austen guilty of aiding the suicide, she not only had to have helped Treadwell obtain the drug she used to kill herself but also had to have known Treadwell was contemplating suicide, and had to have intended to help Treadwell die.
Stevens said that if the pentobarbitone was sourced through Austen, she had wanted to give Treadwell the comfort of knowing that she could control the end of her life if she wanted, at some time in the future.
There was evidence that even if people had the means, they did not always use it.
After the verdicts, Detective Sergeant Richard Gibson said this was a sensitive case and the verdicts reflected that.
The day had begun with dozens of supporters applauding as Austen entered the court. Many had attended the two-week hearing. As the trial progressed, donations continued to roll in to fund her legal defence, and by yesterday $68,300 had been raised.
Austen, 67, is a former primary school teacher. She is married with two adult sons. She was co-ordinator of the Wellington branch of Exit International, and chaired Wellington’s End-of-Life Choice group, which is where she recalled first meeting Treadwell.
They had both been adopted, which Treadwell had seen as a bond between them.
Treadwell had been an advocate for law change and made a submission to a select committee in support of that.
She was described during the trial as being lively, a churchgoer but spiritual rather than religious, a dedicated walker whose ability was deserting her, and keen on music performances. Austen described her as always being ‘‘beautifully made up’’, and looking stunning.
But there was another side to Treadwell. Arthritis was crippling her hands and starting to affect her feet. She had sore hips and jaw, and from at least 1991, she had had treatment for depression. Winters were especially hard.
The judge had told jurors in her summing up that even though a bill was before Parliament to allow terminally ill, or people suffering grievous or incurable illness, to ask for assisted dying, it was irrelevant to the decisions they had to make in Austen’s case.
The jury heard that when police begun investigating Treadwell’s death, they found references in her diary to a person that they believed was Austen.
Austen’s house and phone calls were bugged and her emails were collected.
Annemarie Treadwell was not terminally ill but she was through with life. Outwardly, she may have impressed others with her liveliness. Her diary recorded her days. Time spent with her daughter and friends, outings, and enthusiasms.
Her doctor considered her one of the more active and well older patients.
In the diary, discovered after her death, Treadwell wrote that her doctor seemed to think she was much better than she was, physically and mentally.
But she thought she had found someone who understood, someone who ‘‘accepted my view of my case’’. Susan ‘‘Suzy’’ Austen was a euthanasia activist who had the contacts to source pentobarbitone overseas.
So Treadwell made her plans, put her affairs in order, wrote cheques for the charities she supported and put her much-loved white cat in the hands of vets who would find it a new home.
She left a letter when she took her own life, but months earlier she had publicly declared her wish to control her own death.
It appeared achingly honest and emphatic.
Treadwell, ‘‘still with all her marbles’’, wanted options for when she was done with life. And she wanted a parliamentary committee considering assisted dying to know why.
There were many words in capital letters, underlined, some in italics. Treadwell couldn’t find enough ways to convey how much she wanted the law changed. Her words were alive and forceful.
It was January 2016 and she was in a retirement home in Kilbirnie.
She was 77, and said ageing was filled with continuous losses. Youth had also been a time of loss. When Treadwell was just five days old her mother died.
By the time she wrote to the select committee, she was on a steady diet of painkillers for the arthritis that had crippled her hands, and was now spoiling her feet, and perhaps her hips.
She was annoyed that it made her clumsy and embarrassed when she dropped things in public.
In the gloomy months of the year, seasonal affective disorder overlaid the clinical depression she suffered.
The occasional ‘‘senior moment’’ had developed into short-term memory loss. She wasted time looking for her keys, and forgot appointments.
‘‘This leaves an intelligent person like myself feeling embarrassed and frustrated.’’
She saw only a slow, relentless deterioration ahead. Through her life she had been a keen reader, alert and able to remember faces and names. She was losing that and she was losing her confidence.
Treadwell feared she would have to give up driving.
‘‘I have observed amongst my peers how because of lack of a car not only are their horizons reduced but that loss impacts HUGELY on that most precious of ‘gifts’ our AUTONOMY!!’’
University-educated, and having lived in many countries, Treadwell said her thirst for knowledge was still alive and kicking, but she lacked the energy to follow her interests.
‘‘My world is shrinking and I feel myself becoming boring and pitiful ... and − once again − I feel foolish in company whereas before people would be keen to hear my input!’’
She felt as she got older she had become invisible, or was treated like a clueless child.
A son lived in Sydney, her daughter was closer but in the throes of changing careers and with the pull of a father also in a retirement home in a different city.
Treadwell wrote movingly about the loneliness of old age. ‘‘The lack of loving touching lies silently and bleakly in the background of my and others’ lives.
‘‘Both these sources of intimacy and touching have begun to fall away through the reluctance/fear of younger (AND middle aged) people to deal with older people. And dare I mention that lack of the joy of loving sexual touching can also be a deep source of despair?
‘‘For older human beings it is not considered ‘seemly’ or even laughable for people of over 60 to talk about these pleasurable AND healing gifts we experienced when we we younger. The silence on this topic is yet another way that makes us feel invisible. Not only the lack of human touching, but also the silence about its importance is doubly hurtful.’’
For five years, she had spent two months a year in the Netherlands to be a loving daughter, seeing the decline of her adoptive mother. She didn’t want that to happen to her.
She had decided to move to a retirement home aged about 70, when she was still able to deal with the shift herself. At the home, she found small rooms with a unit for bits and pieces to remind residents ‘‘of who they were’’.
‘‘One could say they are being ‘warehoused’ because our present legislation will not allow them to make their own choice when they still have the capacity to do so.’’
Looking after the frail elderly well meant consigning them to years of nothingness, with little joy and no hope, she said. ‘‘NO longer do their house, garden, clothes, membership of a church or clubs affirm who they are or were; they’re now just vulnerable ‘‘little oldies’’, with grey hair and glasses, having lost their individuality − at the mercy of the multitude of incrementally increasing ailments that afflict their bodies.’’
Her words raged against being refused autonomy in life and in the choice of death. She didn’t want to be a burden on her family, having them dread phone calls about accidents.
‘‘Just peace of mind that Mum is in the right place for the support she needs at this stage of her life. And PEACE OF MIND for me that I know I will not have to go on suffering for many more useless years!’’
The death notice for Treadwell said that she died peacefully at her home on June 6, 2016, less than five months after she had written her submission to the select committee.