The Law of God

With his wife beside him, Dr. Hermann Sander, the "mercy killer" of a cancer patient, stood before a court in Manchester, N.H. As the central figure in a deep and troubled discussion, he also stood before the world. His case had stirred up discussion in London, Vatican City, corner drugstores and church pulpits.

Euthanasia societies saw it as proof of the need for laws that would make such killings legal. Sander's neighbors in the town of Candia (pop. 965) saw him as a sympathetic figure; 605 of them signed a testimonial expressing their faith in the 41-year-old doctor who had ended the life and suffering of a dying woman by giving her intravenous injections of air (TIME, Jan. 9). But his longtime friend, Attorney General William Phinney, saw Sander as a killer who must answer for his deed before the law of man and of God.

"If 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' is a 'law of God' that convicts Dr. Sander of murder," cried Harvard's Anthropologist Earnest Hooton, "let us have done with such a savage and subhuman deity and substitute a God of mercy and loving-kindness."

Said the Most Rev. Richard J. Gushing, Archbishop of Boston: "Human life is sacred because it comes from God . . . The state itself does not have the right to take the life of a sick person."

But the state itself had the right to take Dr. Sander's life--by hanging--if it so willed. Indicted on a charge of murder, he rose last week in superior court to make his plea. "What say you?" the clerk asked him. He said clearly: "Not guilty." Free on $25,000 bail, barred temporarily from practicing, wan and tired, he walked out of court to await his trial.

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