是仁爱母亲还是冷血杀手?

Frances Inglis为严重瘫痪的儿子注射过量海洛因致其死亡。出于常情，人们想从她的脸上看到痛苦，但却失败了。她空洞、率直的凝视和紧闭的双唇让人们无功而返。尽管知道摄像机对自己并不友善，这位略显憔悴的57岁女性还是顺从地接受了记者的拍照要求。
It is natural but futile to examine the face of Frances Inglis for signs of the torment that led her to give her severely disabled son a fatal injection of heroin. Her blank, straight forward gaze and compressed lips tell us nothing. They are the features of a resigned, slightly careworn 57-year-old woman who has been asked to pose for an official photograph, knowing the camera will not be kind.
　　
这，就是已被定罪为杀人凶手的面孔。她曾两次试图让自己22岁的儿子汤姆“彻底解脱”。然而，第一次尝试却以失败告终。杀人未遂获保释后，被禁止探视儿子的她又冒充汤姆的姑妈进入了位于英格兰东南部的赫特福德郡的私人疗养院。
And yet this is the face of a convicted murderer. She twice tried to put her 22-year-old son, Tom, beyond suffering. Her first attempt to kill him failed. On bail for his attempted murder and banned from seeing him, she entered his nursing home in Hertford shire by posing as his aunt.
　　
带着偷来的注射器和价值200美元的海洛因，她用氧气瓶、轮椅堵住病房门，还在门锁处涂上强力胶为自己争取更多时间。
Armed with a stolen syringe and ￡200 worth of heroin, she barricaded herself in his room with an oxygen cylinder and a wheelchair and poured strong glue into the lock to buy herself time.
　　
“我拿起针管为他注射，抱着他，告诉他这一切都将过去。”在位于英国伦敦老贝利街的中央刑事法庭上，她向陪审团缓缓道出整个过程。“心中怀着对儿子的爱”，由于不忍儿子不断遭受病痛的折磨，她选择用致命性注射来终结爱子的生命。虽坚信此举"出于仁慈"，她也承认知道自己的所作所为触犯了法律。
"I took the syringe and injected him and held him and told him everything would be fine," she softly told an Old Bailey jury. She gave the lethal injection "with love in her heart" and from a conviction that he was being tortured by constant pain. She believed she was performing an "act of mercy", but she also admitted knowing that what she did was against the law.
　
Frances Inglis最终被判无期徒刑，至少入狱9年。公众对此的强烈反感反映了人们对母子情深的本能理解。她之所以这样做是因为坚信其他抉择更加残忍：因为所有维持生命的机制都被切断，她只能眼睁睁地看着他慢慢死于饥渴--她假定这些都获得了高等法院的允许。
The wave of public revulsion at Frances Inglis's life sentence, of which she must serve at least nine years, reflects an instinctive understanding of the fierceness of that bond. She believed the alternative was crueller: watching him die slowly of hunger and thirst as his life-support mechanism was switched off - assuming that this had been allowed by the high court.