March 29, 2024

Celebrity lawyer discovers new species of mercy killing

The celebrity criminal lawyer who defended Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, Jim Bakker, Claus von Bülow and O.J. Simpson has come up with a novel mercy killing defence. Giji Jordan, a millionaire single mother, gave her son Jude a cocktail of drugs in an up-market Manhattan hotel in February last year. Her lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School, says that this is not a case of murder, but justifiable altruistic filicide.

The celebrity criminal lawyer who defended Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, Jim Bakker, Claus von Bülow and O.J. Simpson has come up with a novel mercy killing defence. Giji Jordan, a 50-year-old millionaire single mother, gave her son Jude a cocktail of drugs in an up-market Manhattan hotel in February last year. Her lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School, says that this is not a case of murder, but justifiable altruistic filicide.

Ms Jordan’s motives were certainly tangled. She says that she killed Jude to save him from a lifetime of sexual abuse by his biological father, a California yoga instructor. She accuses her estranged husband of stealing from their companies and of plotting to harm her. Her son had some sort of developmental disability and typed out his allegations about abuse on a laptop. According to the Wall Street Journal, there appears to be no evidence of these crimes by either man.

The New York District Attorney’s office is not impressed by the plea. “While, unquestionably, defendant has a right to a defense, she does not get to simply conjure one from the ether,” says lead prosecutor Kerry O’Connell. ~ Wall Street Journal, Aug 11

Michael Cook
law
mercy killing
New York
US