David Moor

John David Moor (1947 – 14 October 2000) was a British general practitioner who was prosecuted in 1999 for the euthanasia of a patient. He was found not guilty but admitted in a press interview to having helped up to 300 people to die. He was the first doctor in Britain to be tried solely for the mercy killing of a patient. thumb

Career Moor worked as a GP in Fenham, Newcastle upon Tyne, but retired just before his trial in 1999.

George Liddell George Liddell was an 85-year-old former ambulance driver and a widower, who had cancer of the bowel. An operation was done to remove part of his bowel, but there was still some cancerous tissue left in surrounding fatty tissue and the liver. Liddell was sent home by the hospital to live with his daughter and to be treated by Moor and a team of nurses. The patient's condition deteriorated and he became depressed and appeared to be in significant pain. Moor prescribed 5 mg of diamorphine to be taken at intervals, but this had to be doubled when the pain got worse. It was agreed by his carers he was "terminally ill".

The jury took 65 minutes to find Moor not guilty.

Reaction Michael Wilks, chairman of the British Medical Association's ethics committee, said after the trial that guidelines for doctors were insufficiently clear: "We are no further along the road towards any change in the law on euthanasia [...] This case just tells us that doctors who take the law into their own hands, who intend to kill their patients, as it was originally thought that Dr Moor had, are likely to be prosecuted."

Broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy said: "Dr Moor should never have been the whole trial was a complete waste of time and money [...] He was only doing what hundreds and hundreds of doctors do in this country every year. The sooner the law is changed to allow doctors to legally help people on their way, the better."