R v Dudley and Stephens

R v Dudley and Stephens, decided by the Queen's Bench Division of the English High Court in 1884, is the leading English authority that necessity is no defense to a charge of murder. The crew of the yacht Mignonette, adrift in a lifeboat after their ship sank, killed and ate the weakest member of their party, a seventeen year old cabin boy named Richard Parker, after roughly three weeks without food and eight days without water; the survivors were rescued and, on returning to England, prosecuted for murder rather than treated as having acted from unavoidable necessity, which was the custom among some sailors of the period. The court, in a specially constituted five judge panel led by Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, held that no necessity, however extreme, justifies the deliberate killing of an innocent person to preserve one's own life, rejecting the argument that Dudley and Stephens had simply chosen who would die when someone had to. Both men were convicted of murder and sentenced to death, though the sentence was commuted by the Crown to six months' imprisonment, an outcome widely read as the legal system stating an absolute principle while quietly tempering its human cost.