A woman who was under police investigation for accompanying her husband to an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland said she wished her case had gone to trial so she could have proved her innocence in front of a jury.
Louise Shackleton, 59, spent 10 months under investigation for assisting a suicide before North Yorkshire police announced this week that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided it was not in the public interest to prosecute her.
She handed herself in to police on legal advice after she returned to the UK from a Dignitas clinic in Zurich where her husband, Anthony, died last December.
She said that while she was relieved her adult children would no longer have to worry about her, she wished she’d had a chance to make her case in open court.
“It wasn’t a relief for me, I would have actually preferred to go to trial. To have 12 people in a jury decide whether or not I was guilty of assisting my husband’s death in any way,” she said. “So it’s not the lawmakers making the decision, it’s actually the general public making the decision of whether or not I am guilty.”
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, assisting a suicide is a crime with a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. A new law that would legalise assisted dying is being scrutinised by the House of Lords, after being voted through by the House of Commons in June.
Shackleton said the law needed to change to stop “desperately grieving people being run through the mill of police investigation”.
She said: “We need to be considering the waste of the taxpayers’ money in these investigations. If my husband had died at home, I would have been treated totally differently.
“I would have been given a family liaison officer and support. I would have been the grieving widow of someone that committed suicide. Because he went to Switzerland, I was criminalised and I was interviewed under caution.”
Anthony was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2018, and spent the next few years ticking off his bucket list with his family – travelling to Canada, Iceland and New York, and pursuing his passion for photography. When his condition deteriorated and he required a wheelchair to move around, he first mentioned he was considering taking his own life at home.
“I said: ‘You won’t know what you’re doing, it’s really, really dangerous.’ I just thought he was feeling a bit down, things were getting worse for him,” Shackleton said. “It wasn’t long after that that he said: ‘I’ve joined Dignitas. It’s my only option.’
“He was adamant that I was not going to go with him. He did not want to get me in trouble. But there was no discussion about that whatsoever – I was coming. He was not going to go and die alone.”
Shackleton said she was relieved her husband was able to have a peaceful death and recalls how in his last moments he laughed with her.
But her ability to grieve his death has been hindered by the months-long police investigation, which also meant she wasn’t able to access any of her husband’s devices, including his tablet, which contained a letter he had written to her shortly before his death.
“After the case closed, I opened it up and there was a letter from him to me, to be read on my return, to comfort me, to reassure me, to tell me to stay strong and tell me how much he loved me and how much he knew what a strain it was for me,” she said.
“That would have been a much bigger comfort 10 months ago. It has almost re-traumatised me again because I should have had access to that. I should have been able to see that. But I was stopped from seeing that because of the police investigation.”
Shackleton said she is sharing her story to promote the need for legal reform. The assisted dying bill has faced some strong opposition in the House of Lords, which has now set up a select committee to consider further evidence before the bill progresses to committee stage.
“We need to stop these deaths from being driven underground and we need to bring them out into the open where the person can be assessed, medics can flag any safeguarding issues and families can stop being traumatised,” Shackleton said.