For Love or Pity

In a Connecticut superior court last week, a jury of parents faced tall, blonde, 21-year-old Carol Paight. On an afternoon four months before, Carol had become one of a legion of transgressors who, either out of love or pity, have assumed a right that is not theirs: the right to take a human life. She had killed her cancer-riddled father. *

Carol's family called her "Ditty." They lived in a small house in an ordinary-looking section of Stamford. Ditty's father was Police Sergeant Carl Paight, a member of the force for 27 years. Her mother taught school in New York. The Paights sent Ditty to New England College in New Hampshire, and her brother, Carl Jr., to New Haven State Teachers College. Between Ditty and her father was a deep and affectionate bond.

It was an affection which reached a crisis one September afternoon. On that day, while Sergeant Paight underwent an exploratory operation, Ditty and her mother went to St. Mary's Church and prayed. Sergeant Paight was a Methodist; his wife and children Roman Catholics. In Ditty's mind was the recollection of an aunt and a great-aunt who had died of cancer. Ditty and her mother went back to the hospital. There Dr. William E. Smith gave them his report: Sergeant Paight's case was hopeless; he had at the most two months to live.

"I Shot Him." Hysterically, Ditty pleaded with Dr. Smith not to tell her father. Paight was still under the anesthetic, and Ditty and her mother went home. Friends later recalled Ditty's strange behavior. She seemed frigidly calm, then unexpectedly snatched up a tumbler and smashed it against a wall. Her later actions were pieced together by witnesses in court last week.

She went to a coat closet, got her father's .38-caliber revolver and drove to a woods. There she experimentally fired one shot, then, with the gun wrapped up in a jacket, drove to the hospital.

A nurse's aide was on duty in Sergeant Paight's room. Ditty waited while her father lay unconscious on the hospital bed. The nurse's aide left on an errand.

Nurse Margaret Smith, on duty in the chart room, heard what she thought was a tray falling, a few minutes later looked up to see Carol Paight standing in the doorway. Ditty wanted someone to come and look at her father. Nurse Smith hurried into his room, found him dying, shot through the left temple. On the tray table at the foot of his bed was his revolver. Ditty, with her blonde head resting against the wall, said quietly: "I shot him."

"I Would Try." A grand jury indicted Ditty for second-degree murder. Neighbors, the mayor, business and civic leaders of Stamford who had known and respected Sergeant Paight, rallied to his daughter's side, raised a defense fund.

Would the men & women summoned to form a jury have any prejudice against the girl? Would they have any sympathy? These two questions, put by defense counsel and prosecutor, were critical. The moral bewilderment of the talesmen was expressed by Mrs. Alice Leopold, a representative in Connecticut's general assembly. Did Mrs. Leopold believe it was proper to take a human life to put a person out of suffering? "I do not know," she said. Judge John A. Cornell interposed: Could she follow the judge's instructions on the law even though they were in violent disagreement with her personal convictions? Said Mrs. Leopold: "I would try." Mrs. Leopold, eight other women and three men, all avowing neither prejudice nor sympathy, took their seats in the jury box. This week Ditty's lawyer, David Goldstein, tried to show that Ditty was torn by grief and temporarily insane, indicated that he would ask for mercy for another mercy killer.

* In Manchester, N.H., Dr. Hermann Sander will face trial Feb. 20 for the "mercy killing" of a cancerous woman patient (TIME, Jan. 9).

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