News

Newcastle GP charged with murder

Clare Dyer, legal correspondent, BMJ

A GP who admitted giving lethal doses of painkillers to terminally ill patients has been charged with the murder of an elderly patient.

David Moor, aged 51, has been summonsed to appear before Newcastle upon Tyne magistrates on 30 July. He was arrested last July and given bail pending the outcome of drugs tests on the body of George Liddell, a former ambulanceman who died of cancer aged 85.

Northumbria Police launched an inquiry after the Newcastle coroner, Leonard Coyle, refused to release Mr Liddell's body for cremation. Dr Moor hit the headlines last summer when he claimed in newspaper interviews to have helped dozens of patients to die in his 30 years of practice (26 July 1997, p 206). He was speaking in support of Dr Michael Irwin, a retired GP and former medical adviser to the United Nations, who sparked off a controversy about euthanasia when he said he had helped about 50 patients to die.

Mr Liddell died last July. The death certificate signed by Dr Moor gave the cause of death as carcinomatosis and bowel cancer. Dr Moor ran a singlehanded practice in Fenham, Newcastle, but he retired in March to his smallholding in Stamfordham, Northumberland.

His solicitor, Ian Barker, of the firm Hempsons, has advised Dr Moor that he cannot make any comment, save to say that the matter will be "vigorously defended."

To convict a doctor of murder, which carries an automatic life sentence, the prosecution has to satisfy the jury that the doctor's action caused the death. This can be difficult to prove in the case of a terminally ill patient whose death could have been caused by the illness; much will depend on the nature and quantity of the substance administered by the doctor.

The prosecution also has to prove an intention to kill rather than just to relieve pain. A doctor is not guilty of murder if his intention is to relieve pain, even if he knows he is inevitably hastening death. In 1992 a consultant rheumatologist, Nigel Cox, was convicted of attempted murder and given a suspended sentence after injecting an elderly patient with potassium chloride. He would probably have faced a murder charge if the patient's body had not been cremated by the time police were called in, making it impossible to prove the cause of death.