A deal is being thrashed out to spare a British pensioner, accused of the premeditated murder in Cyprus of his terminally ill wife, from spending the rest of his life behind bars.
David Hunter, a former Northumberland miner, faces the prospect of being handed a 25-year sentence if found guilty.
But on Wednesday, as Paphos district court reconvened to hear the groundbreaking case, it became clear that the Briton’s fate hung on an agreement being reached that would have him plead guilty to manslaughter when the court sits again on 18 November.
“We have studied the case and recommended that the charge be changed from premeditated murder to manslaughter,” deputy state prosecutor Andreas Hadjikyrou told reporters.
“It is the right thing for David. He would otherwise spend the rest of his life in prison.”
David and Janice Hunter, teenage sweethearts when they first fell in love, had lived together for more than 50 years when, less than a week before Christmas last year, the 75-year-old allegedly beseeched her husband to end what had become a life of extreme suffering due to advanced leukaemia.
Hunter said he finally succumbed to his wife’s wishes, using his bare hands to block her air passages and smother her to death – an act that took 15 minutes – in the sitting room of the couple’s rented maisonette outside the resort town on the country’s south-west coast. He then attempted to take his own life by overdosing on prescription pills and alcohol, before being found by police who were alerted by his brother, who had been called by Hunter.
“From the start we said it was in no one’s interest if David was given a lengthy prison sentence, and if we can come to an agreement on the facts, which we hopefully can, we hope that the court will consider a suspended sentence, so that he can return to the UK to be with his family,” said Michael Polak of the British legal aid group, Justice Abroad, who flew to the island for the trial. “It is positive that the prosecution and ourselves are coming closer together in understanding the facts.”
In the absence of a suicide note, the process of changing the charge in a country where euthanasia is outlawed has not been easy. Although Janice Hunter had received hospital care which included injections and blood transfusions, the degree to which she was suffering from leukaemia – a disease that also killed her sister, Kathleen, decades earlier – remains a possible point of contention, according to the prosecution.
“It is historic in that it is the first case of its kind in Cyprus,” Polak told the Guardian, saying he had handed the court a copy of Kathleen’s death certificate stating that she died in appalling pain from complications sustained from leukaemia. “But there is considerable case law in other common-law countries that would support [our case].”
The former miner spent several weeks in hospital where doctors who had pumped his stomach described him as having no desire to live after the death of his wife. Now 75, he appeared ruddy faced and considerably thinner as he stood in the dock, clasping the bench with both hands while a court interpreter translated proceedings. The past nine months incarcerated in Nicosia’s vastly overcrowded central prison was replete with problems, not least the loneliness of being without his companion of so many years, despite daily phone calls to his daughter, Lesley, back home.
“Cyprus was paradise, she loved it,” Hunter said before being returned under police escort to his 11-man cell in the island’s capital. “We never regretted moving here. It was a life in the sun before Janice got ill.”
