Jailed for an act of love in a grotesque betrayal of justice

Jonathan Brocklebank

IT was not your typical culpable homicide. When the paramedic came into the bedroom where Patricia Gordon lay dead, he found her killer lying beside her, distraught, stroking her hair.

When the police arrived, Ian Gordon said he had held a pillow against his wife’s face until she was gone – honouring his promise to end her suffering when the time came. That moment arrived early on April 28 last year when neither could take it any more.

Terminally ill with suspected lung cancer for which she refused diagnosis and treatment, Mrs Gordon was, in her daughter Gail’s words, ‘screaming and moaning’ in agony. For his part, Mr Gordon ‘couldn’t see her in that pain’.

What he did to end his wife’s pain was described by a medically trained character witness who had known him for 25 years as a ‘final act of love’. Mr Gordon himself said of his crime: ‘I know I’m going to jail, I don’t know how long for, but I don’t have a single regret.’

This week, the 67-year-old from Troon, Ayrshire, learned the length of his jail sentence for a crime he committed with his children’s blessing, the support of his wife’s brother and the understanding and approval of his extended family and circle of friends.

Lord Arthurson told him he would go to prison for three years and four months. ‘In the public interest, only a custodial sentence is appropriate in your case,’ the judge said. In a legal jurisdiction with often eccentric ideas about the public interest, that was an interesting way of putting it.

Devotion

Mr Gordon is a man who had never been convicted of a crime. My guess is that, when he is eventually released, he will give neither the police nor the lawabiding public sleepless nights.

He was, by all accounts, a devoted husband whose wife was ‘his reason for getting up in the morning’. The fact he was prepared to go to prison to allow her to die as she wished – at home, away from hospital – was, perhaps, the ultimate measure of that devotion.

In short, the man now languishing behind bars appears, on the evidence of every witness called to court and in the estimation of the judge who sentenced him, to be a thoroughly decent, thoughtful and valuable member of society.

What, then, is he doing in jail? The answer to that is Mr Gordon is a killer. By his own admission he took his dying wife’s life rather than call an ambulance. He did so because she had a long history of anxiety, was terrified of hospitals and determined to die where and when she chose rather than have her life prolonged against her will in a place she did not want to be.

Simply, he killed her because he cared more about keeping his promise to the love of his life in the final days of their 50 years together than about observing the law. Such are the moral crises which visit some devoted couples late in marriages when health fails and a parting becomes inevitable and imminent.

And I am not at all depressed by those who, in such wretched circumstances, put love above the law.

What depresses me is Mr Gordon presumed he was going to prison for his act of love and was quite correct.

Yet, for habitual offenders driven by vices society abhors – greed, hatred, rage, fecklessness – there is a presumption against prison.

Consider what the judge told Mr Gordon as he stood in the dock to be sentenced: ‘You are a 67-year-old first offender who has lived an exemplary life within your community in partnership with your lifelong companion, your wife, the deceased.’

To how many of those standing guilty as charged in our courts could any judge or sheriff pay such tribute?

It could not be said of the 30-year-old thug appearing in Sheriff George Way’s court in Dundee this year on charges of stalking a woman and posting revenge porn pictures of her on social media and distributing them to her family.

His previous offences included car theft, housebreaking, attempted extortion, tying up and robbing a woman in her home, assaulting a heavily pregnant girlfriend and threatening to blow up a block of flats.

No, a sheriff could hardly accuse such a character of exemplary conduct in his community. Only of terrorising it.

But the sheriff kept him out of prison by sentencing him to participate in a domestic abuse group work programme. All in the public interest, you understand.

In days gone by, one-man crimewaves such as this might have been jailed for up to a year for his latest offences.

But the Scottish Government, in its wisdom, believes these comparatively short spells in jail do more harm than good. It wants sheriffs to maintain a presumption against prison terms of less than a year and instead come up with imaginative disposals which keep them at liberty.

Sentencing some of them to learn the error of their ways by attending group work in the community is part of that.

Of course, the SNP does not suggest for a minute that serious criminals be kept out of jail. Heaven forbid. Society must be protected from hardcore felons – in whose number I assume wife-killers such as Ian Gordon are included.

Criminality

No, when it talks about offenders who should be spared custodial sentences, the Scottish Government surely refers to a lower level of criminality altogether. Or so you might imagine until you look at the actual crimes which have typically attracted sentences of up to 12 months.

In 2015-16, more than 100 people were imprisoned for less than a year for attempted murder or serious assault.

It would be lovely to imagine these murderous attacks were motivated by some noble intent – unique circumstances, perhaps, which trumped strict adherence to the law. But we are not fools. These were vicious attempts to inflict serious injury or kill.

Yet criminals such as these, who once faced jail terms of up to a year, can now expect to walk free and serve sentences in our communities.

Not so Ian Gordon. I understand he broke the law and I understand, too, that many reasonable people might disagree on an appropriate sentence for a mercy killing.

But Mr Gordon is no threat to society. The very judge who put him away called him a credit to his community.

It seems to me that, far from being in the public interest, his incarceration is in no one’s interest, least of all that of his family who love him.

I wring my hands rather less over prison time for incorrigible criminals after second, third and fourth chances are repaid with yet more lawlessness and suffering for victims.

I find I am comfortable with the view jail is an appropriate disposal for those who display neither conscience nor care for their criminal actions.

There seems something wholly beneficial to the public interest about having a physical barrier stopping them from behaving that way until they learn to stop themselves.

Of course, those are the very offenders the judiciary must now bend over backwards to keep out of jail. While a good man – as deserving a case for a community-based sentence as I have seen – is banged up.

The irony is grotesque.