An English judge has declined to send a woman to prison for smothering her terminally ill father with a pillow, after a prosecutor said Lisa Davenport believed that the killing "was an act of mercy." She received a two-year suspended prison sentence in the death of Barrie Davenport, 88, at his retirement home in October 2022, the BBC reports. The defendant earlier had pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. On Friday, the Oxford court heard about the pain her father was in from pancreatic cancer.
Lisa Davenport was "distressed by how her father appeared" on his last day, said the prosecutor, John Price. "This background might explain why a devoted daughter did what she did to her father that evening." The judge told the court he had decided on a "merciful course" after accepting that Davenport was "solely motived by a wish to bring his suffering to an end and that his end was close at hand." Price said she had told a friend immediately after suffocating her father, "I smothered him," per the Guardian. She reportedly added, "You must not tell anybody and the family must not know because I will be sent to prison." (More United Kingdom stories.)