Sjd Activity 1

ACTIVITY 1.1

Both these stories were and extremely tragic. They both evoked feelings of sadness, not only for the person reading the story but most importantly for the families involved as well.

In the Euthanasia case, it was a son who was desperate to put an end to the suffering of his dying mother, who was suffering from a terminal disease.

In the Dewani case, I can only imagine the heart ache and sorrow felt by her family on hearing about the death of their daughter. She was murdered thousands of kilometers away from home whilst she was on honeymoon.

The feelings of the everyone concerned in these two cases differs in the sense that the family of the Annie Dewani did not expect to have their daughters life come to such a tragic end. In the Davison case, his mother was obviously very ill and in constant pain.

Both these stories made me feel extremely sad. However, the Dewani case angered me to an extent that Shrien Dewani had intended to kill his wife before they came to South Africa. He used the crime levels in our country and our justice system to get away with murder. In the end….on South African soil, he did.

I did have different reactions to the two stories. The first case were feeling of sorrow for a woman who probably endured such pain that the thought of taking her life was the only option. In the Dewani case I think it was more a sense of shock that a man could be so cold and heartless as to bring his wife to a foreign country and have her murdered there.

In my opinion both Sean Davison and Shrien Dewani had committed a crime. Euthenasia is against the law, taking a life is against the law. Both these crimes are acts of murder. Although Shrien Dewani was not the ‘trigger man’, he orchestrated his wife’s murder. Sean Davison planned to put an end to his mother’s suffering by committed an act of euthanasia. In both these cases the murder was premeditated. At the end of the day, they are both seen as people who have taken the life...