Dodgy Defences Part Three: Necessity

The Illustrated Police News, 15th November 1884

Imagine this. It is 1884 and your name is Edwin Stephens. You are an experienced seaman, with a wife and children. You join the small crew of a yacht called Mignonette, which the captain, Tom Dudley, is transporting from Southampton to Sydney on behalf of a wealthy Australian lawyer. Alongside yourself and Captain Dudley, the crew consists of another seaman, Edmund Brooks, and an orphaned cabin boy named Richard Parker. On 19th May, you set off.

Everything goes splendidly until the weather turns in the middle of June. The weather eases off at the beginning of July, but then by the 3rd, as you approach the Cape of Good Hope, a storm kicks up. The storm gets worse and worse until eventually, on the 5th, Mignonette is overwhelmed and terribly damaged and you cry out

"My God, her side is knocked in!"

With only a few moments notice, the four of you pile into a 13 feet long lifeboat, made of quarter-inch-thick boards. The Captain grabs a number of tins of what he believes is preserved meat, but as he launches himself into the mahogany lifeboat they slip from his grasp and tumble into the sea; he keeps hold of only two. Within five minutes, the yacht has sunk, and the only items you have managed to salvage are some navigational equipment and a couple of tins of what is actually turnip. You are 700 miles from land and you have absolutely no fresh water. That night, a shark attacks your lifeboat and you are forced to whack it with the oars until it goes away.

The Illustrated Police News, 15th November 1884

The next day is 6th July and you spend it floating in open water. The following day, the 7th, the Captain rations out the first tin of turnips. On the 8th, you float some more. On the 9th, you yourself are the hero of the day when you manage to catch a turtle weighing in at about five and a half kilos. On the 10th you at least have food. At some point on the 11th or 12th, you even eat the bones. On the 13th, you begin to drink your own urine. It is well known among sailors that drinking seawater is fatal, so you have no real choice. On about the 15th, ten days after Mignonette sank beneath the waves, the four of you finally run out of food, having also consumed the second tin of turnips. 

The next day, the 16th, somebody finally suggests drawing straws. If the four of you remain as you are then you will almost certainly all die. If you draw lots, he who draws the shortest straw will be the sacrifice. And you will eat him. Nobody wants to discuss this option.

On the 18th, Richard Parker, the teenaged cabin boy, cannot help himself, and begins to drink seawater. Two days later he is extremely ill and curls up at one end of the boat. On the 21st, it is again mentioned that you should draw lots, but again, it goes nowhere. On either the 23rd or the 24th, having been at sea for a shocking eighteen or nineteen days, Parker the cabin boy slips into a coma. The Captain tells you and Brooks once again that you should draw lots, but Brooks refuses. That night, Captain Dudley tells you quietly that the cabin boy is dying. Not only that, but he is free from responsibilities, while you have a wife and children. Unable to even think straight, you decide to put the matter off until morning.

Dawn breaks. The hunger and above all the thirst is unbearable. You feel crazed with it. Finally, you agree. Dudley will do the deed and you will prepare to grab Parker if he struggles, though it seems unlikely that he will. Dudley says a small prayer. Then exclaims,

"Now, Dick, your time is come!"

"What, me Sir?" the unfortunate boy cries. "Yes, my boy," comes the reply and with that Captain Dudley slides a penknife into his jugular. He dies almost instantly. Brooks, who had moved as far away as possible and covered his face, now comes close and joins you and the Captain as you begin your horrifying meal. Parker's blood serves to quench your unbearable thirst. That night, you even manage to catch some rainwater.

You survive on Parker's body for the next four days.

Finally, on 29th July, having been lost at sea for twenty-four days, you spot a sail on the horizon. 

What do you think happened next? Did everybody understand perfectly the impossible situation that Dudley, Stephens, and Brooks had been placed in during their almost month-long exile on the high seas? Or could it be that the authorities and public alike were horrified by the events and  the "putrid and mangled remains of the victim" which still lay in the lifeboat when they were rescued?

Illustrated Police News, 14th September 1884

The three men finally arrived back in Falmouth, gave statements to the authorities, and made arrangements to travel home that same evening. Their arrests came as a terrible shock to them all. Captain Dudley wrote to his wife that, 'they say it is my statement that has caused the inquiry. I have told the truth. If I had told a lie I should be sharing the comforts of home instead of being here.'

In his statement, Stephens recounted how

"The lad dying before our eyes, the longing for his blood came upon us, and on Friday morning, the twentieth day of us being cast away, the master hastened his death by bleeding him. In a minute all was over."

Much of the public supported the three men, including the poor victim's brother, who shook hands with them in court. The Home Secretary, William Harcourt, was disgusted, both by the crime and by the public's reaction to it and, while Brooks was not taken to trial (but rather used as a prosecution witness), the other two were. The legal debate hinged on the defence of necessity; that is, whether the crime could be justified in terms of Dudley and Stephens having had no choice. This defence is usually unsuccessful, especially in more serious crimes. A prisoner escaping a burning prison would be able to defend their prison escape, but given that self-defence and duress are separate issues, the idea that it could be necessary to commit murder is difficult to prove. One's own desperate hunger is unlikely to be sufficient excuse.

Sir John Walter Huddleston, National Portrait Gallery

The case was originally heard before Justice Huddleston and 'in what was known as a "special verdict”, the jury set out the facts of the case. They found that there appeared to Dudley and Stephens every probability that unless they killed the boy, or one of themselves, they would die of starvation. The jury showed some sympathy but couldn’t say whether or not their findings of fact should give rise to a verdict of murder.' Huddleston sent the case to the High Court, where a judgment of law could be made based on the established facts. These judges duly found it to be a case of murder and the men were sentenced to death though, as we have seen happened fairly often, these sentenced were commuted. 

Lord Coleridge CJ explained in the ruling that it was in fact not a matter of necessity at all, but rather temptation. It is worth reproducing his comments at length

"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….."

The Judge continued with the following

"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'”

So, to conclude, the answer seems to be no, it is never okay to kill a cabin boy, even if you are extremely hungry. A fascinating case, R v Dudley and Stephens is taught to pretty much every first year law student, and it isn't difficult to see why. Next week, we return to Justice Huddleston and travel back through his life to before he was a judge, when he was just a lowly defence barrister, involving himself with political radicals.

Memorial to Richard Parker in Southampton