A woman arrested after helping a paralysed woman access an assisted dying facility has blasted 'heavy-handed' officers banging on her door at 5.30am, before locking her up.
Earlier this year, former NHS worker Sue Lawford said that she accompanied Sharon Johnston, a 60-year-old woman who became tetraplegic following a fall, on her trip to the well-known Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, where she had chosen to end her life.
The Swiss non-profit organisation provides physician-assisted suicide to people with severe or terminal illnesses.
Sue had returned to her home in Cardiff following Sharon's death, where she said that she was woken by police at 5.30am. She was arrested, placed in the back of a police van, and driven to a station to be locked up.
The 70-year-old has now told of the "claustrophobic" experience of being locked in the cells, and maintains she did not break the law as she claimed that Sharon made all the arrangements herself with Dignitas.
Speaking to The Mirror Online, Sue said it didn’t come as a huge surprise that police got involved, as Sharon had been contacted by Dyfed Powys Police and Social Services several times during the journey to Switzerland.
She believed the carers who went to Sharon's home four times a day had reported her missing.
Sue said that she had subsequently planned to visit her police station the morning after her arrival home to explain the situation.
“But I didn’t get the chance to do that, because they came and arrested me,” she said.
A spokesperson from Dyfed Powys Police confirmed they had arrested a 69-year-old woman from Cardiff on suspicion of assisting suicide, and said it was a "criminal offence in the UK to encourage or assist in the suicide or attempted suicide of another person".
"Following [an] investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Sharon Johnston, the matter has been closed," they said.
Assisted dying is currently illegal in England and Wales under the 1961 Suicide Act. It is also a crime for someone to encourage or assist a person to take their own life.
Sue was “fast asleep” on the morning of February 16 when she said that she and her husband, Rod, were woken by loud banging at their front door.
“Rod and I both jumped out of our skins and the dog went absolutely ballistic. That was scary enough with the dog barking and everything… it’s stressful to be woken up like that,” she said.
Rod went downstairs to open the door and called to her to come down, saying the police were there for her.
“When I came down the stairs in my pyjamas, there were two female police officers in the sitting room,” Sue recalled. “I must have been half asleep, because I thought ‘we’re just going to have a conversation about what’s happened’.”
But next thing she knew, Sue claimed she was being arrested. While she said police didn’t handcuff her, an officer did escort her upstairs and stood there while she got dressed - something she described as being “very intrusive”.
As she was escorted out of the house to a police van, Sue said she saw four male police officers walk towards the house from another van. She later found out that they were at her home for four hours and had “searched the house from top to bottom”.
“My husband asked them if they had a warrant, but they said ‘we don’t need one’. The reason they gave was that the crime I was accused of was in the same category as murder and terrorism” she said.
Sue said that she was assigned a duty solicitor, and was then locked in a cell for the next 16 hours while she waited for detectives to arrive and question her; a process that she said took two about two hours.
She said it was a “stressful and unpleasant” experience that left her feeling “claustrophobic”.
“They don’t know me, and I understand that. But to my way of thinking, it was totally unnecessary. I would have happily gone and talked to them formally under different circumstances.
“I felt it was very heavy-handed.”
Back at Sue’s home, police took both her and her husband’s electronics, which they claimed they didn’t get back until three weeks after the investigation was closed, six months later.
She said she was eventually released from the police station “under investigation”, between 19 and 20 hours after her arrest. She said the months that ensued were stressful; she stopped sleeping properly and developed hypertension, for which she was prescribed medication.
Sue said that she was notified the investigation was being drawn to a close in the form of a “terse email” that said no further action was being taken “due to evidential difficulties”. There was “no hint” of an apology, she noted, adding that she detected a "disappointed" tone.
Retrospectively, Sue said she believed the incident showed “just how broken” laws around assisted suicide in the UK were.
“That people have to go through this rigorous process at huge expense, to actually go to a different country to end their life. We really need to grow up in England and Wales and have a law that, yes, protects people but also enables them to negotiate a humane end to their life when there is no hope of recovery or end to their suffering,” she said.
Sue said she had met Sharon only months before she escorted her to Switzerland, when Sharon had reached out to one of the campaigning groups to see if someone would help her on the journey.
“Her parents had both died and her brother had died when he was quite young, some time ago,” Sue explained. “She had a long-term partner, but that relationship had ended, so she was pretty sort of limited in the help that she could access, really.
Sue said it was a “pretty tough question to be asked” and acknowledged she initially had some personal doubts, but said it was clear Sharon was “100 per cent ready and determined”.
Sue pointed out the law was about assisting and encouraging suicide, but said she had done neither of those things.
“The arrangements were all in place by the time I came to know Sharon and in terms of assisting her? All I did was escort her, I didn’t assist in any other way. I was more of a chaperone, really.
“I certainly wasn’t encouraging her, I would never encourage anyone to end their life if it wasn’t 100 per cent what they wanted to do.”
Sue’s husband and her son, who was in his 30s, were concerned about her plans, but were both “on side” with her decision to help Sharon.
Sue retired some years ago after working as an NHS GP surgery manager.
It was in this role that she said she was first exposed to the process families went through while organising end of life support and came to the conclusion that “palliative care, much as it is absolutely wonderful, for some people doesn’t work”.
“Sadly, there are a lot of people who have what I would call a bad death. It’s terribly traumatic not just for them, but for the people that love them and care about them,” she said.
It was in this job that Sue became involved in a group called Dignity in Dying, a group campaigning for a change in the law on assisted dying for terminally ill, mentally competent adults.
She later joined another group, My Death, My Decision, which campaigns for a broader approach that was more akin to Swiss laws - for people with long-term degenerative conditions and those who are intolerably suffering.
This last category applied to Sharon, Sue said.
“She did say to me on more than one occasion that the worst thing about the fall was that it hadn’t killed her. She felt that to have survived it and to exist from that time, was a cruel blow of fate. She felt that she was not living from that point, she was just existing.”
She said that Sharon had asked Sue to make two phone calls after she died, one of which was to an elderly aunt and the other was to a great nephew.
“They were both very upset to have lost a lovely person, but both of them did thank me for helping Sharon,” Sue recalled.
“Both said, in two separate phone calls, that they knew it was absolutely what she wanted.”
