Mercy Kill / Real Life

• Captive bolts were designed to kill an animal with as little suffering as possible, but as the documentary Earthlings shows, it does not always work as intended. The unbiased fact is that the bolt's operator has to be very well-trained for the bolt hits to be consistently suffering-free.
• The original concept of Coup de Grâce, French for "strike of mercy." Nowadays it just means "finish off."
• The knightly short sword or dagger was called misericorde, from misericordia (Latin for "mercy") for exactly this reason. It was intended to give the Coup de Grâce for a mortally wounded soldier who would otherwise linger on his wounds in agony. It was thin enough to penetrate mail and go between armor plates.
• After the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906, a lot of wooden frame buildings had collapsed with people inside, and many caught fire due to either broken gas mains, upturned stoves or furnaces, or some combination of the two. Many of the people trapped were pinned under debris, but the admittedly few first responders often didn't have the strength to drag them out before said fire could kill them. There are stories of people begging to be shot if they couldn't be freed. There is a story of at least one person who complied before the victim could burn to death, who then went immediately to the nearest police he could find to turn himself in. After listening to his story, the police told him he had done the right thing and let him go.
  • Similarly, in the Alpatacal tragedy (a huge train crash in the Chilean/Argentinian border that killed several Chilean soldiers), there's the urban legend about a recruit who had survived the crash but found his friend badly injured and about to burn to death under the debris. The dying guy begged the other to shoot him dead with his service gun and spare him the upcoming Family-Unfriendly Death, which the survivor did. Then he turned himself in but was absolved by the military tribunal since the victim would've died anyway.
  • Also supposedly occurred in the Quininshill rail crash, among British soldiers trapped in a burning train. There were gunshots heard, but it's not clear if that was men shooting themselves or bullets discharging from the intense heat. Either way, it remains the deadliest rail accident in British history.
• In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Memorial Hospital in New Orleans was surrounded by ten feet of water and did not have enough supplies to maintain their patients. Four of them were killed by hospital personnel and the District Attorney brought murder charges. A grand jury refused to indict them.
• Standard practice for terminally-ill pets, and almost totally uncontroversial (though always heartbreaking). Vets are most often used when one has to say goodbye in this manner, though poorer families (particularly farm families in America) will sometimes take the pet out back and shoot it like Travis had to do with Old Yeller.
  • Also for many large animals, especially horses, with broken or badly injured legs. Until fairly recently, horse with a broken leg, even if given the best care known to veterinary medicine, was almost always better off euthanized. Modern medicine can do better now, but it is often expensive and requires extensive support, and some horses just can't tolerate it long enough to heal.
  • In some areas, this is also done with wild animals if they are unable to be treated (although this is more common if the issue was initially caused by humans).
  • The Veterinarian's Oath, the vet's equivalent of a human physician's Hippocratic Oath, actually mandates this when appropriate, as it specifically pledges to prevent and relieve animal suffering.
• The Carol Carr case. After watching her mother-in-law and husband succumb to Huntington's disease, she saw her two oldest sons develop it as well. She ended up killing them to spare them the pain. This led to controversy in the state of Georgia as to what to try her for... ^note  As for the outcome of the trial, Carol pleaded guilty to "assisted suicide", served about 1 year and 9 months, and was barred from being a caregiver to her last son, James
• Much of the Terri Schiavo controversy dealt with just how much this was the case. Schiavo had an accident that left her clinically brain dead. Terri's husband wanted her taken off of life support, but her parents wanted Terri kept alive.^note It should be noted that Terri's parents believed that her husband had attempted to kill her, leaving her in this state instead. He was never charged. There is no known evidence for it either. After the accident, her husband and parents were initially amicable, with them allowing him to live with them rent-free. It's only after he petitioned for an end to her life support that the split occurred, and the subsequent allegations. In the end, her life support was pulled.
• During the Spanish Inquisition, "heretics" who were condemned to burn at the stake would often, if they confessed, be strangled first to spare them the agony of death by fire and/or asphyxiation.
• This is how Magda and Joseph Goebbels saw the killing of their six children during the last days of the Battle of Berlin in 1945. Hitler also persuaded (or possibly tricked) his wife to take a cyanide pill out of fear she'd be tortured by the Russians. He even fed one to his pet dog, Blondi, just to test whether the poison would do the job (a litter Blondi had given birth to earlier was also put down by gunshots). Given the record of the army surrounding Berlin, and the entirely justifiable level of revenge said army would want on the Nazi High Command, they may not have been wrong.
• An American paratrooper during the Battle of the Bulge witnessed this first hand. Following a skirmish with a German squad, a great majority of the enemy soldiers surrendered, most of them wounded. However, the American's squad did not have the supplies, nor the manpower, to guard or feed the prisoners (like the Americans, the Germans were badly low on supplies and food, and it was one of the reasons they surrendered, to get aid for their wounded.) Finally, the American squad leader grabbed a German machine pistol, gathered just enough ammo for it, and disposed of the rest of the weapons and ammo, telling the German squad leader (who spoke English) the cold hard truth that they could not take them prisoner, and that he was leaving the submachine gun behind for those who wanted to end it quickly; with it being in the coldest part of the European winter, a winter that was already breaking record lows to start with, it was painfully clear to both sides that there was no way for the wounded and starved Germans to survive the night. A few minutes after the Americans left, they began hearing single gunshots behind them.
• In the Pacific Theater during World War II, an American pilot managed to get his badly shot-up plane back to his base, but had the landing gear give out on landing, flipping the plane. When the plane came to rest, the pilot was still alive but badly injured, and the plane caught fire. A Marine officer was the first person to reach the plane, and upon seeing the cockpit engulfed in flames and hearing the screams of the trapped pilot, immediately drew his pistol and shot the man twice in the head, killing him instantly. There was very low-level talk of court-martialing the Marine, until Admiral Nimitz found out and promptly went ballistic, wondering why the fuck they were thinking about court-martialing a man who had the balls to do something that had to be done. Because situations like this happen all the time during war, there are specific sections of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that deal with it directly and absolutely forbid hindsight or Monday-morning quarterbacking, holding that only the conditions at the time of the incident can be taken into account.
• Battlefield medics and surgeons in the past were traditionally "unarmed" but usually allowed to carry pistols, both for self-defense and for providing a quick death to those who were beyond their help.
• In feudal Japan, it was the role of the kaishakunin designated to assist a samurai during his suicide by Seppuku: he has to behead the samurai with a katana to spare him a long agony due to evisceration; it's considered bad form to show pain while ritually disemboweling oneself, but obviously hard to remain stoic for long.
• This is the reason behind the voluntary euthanasia laws in Albania, Belgium, Estonia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, several US states, and the Canadian province of Quebec beginning in 2015, becoming legal across the rest of Canada from June 2016.
  • Sadly (but predictably, as disability rights advocates had been warning about for decades) this has had the knock-on effect of encouraging governments and medical professionals to drastically reduce the (usually already poor) standards of care given to the disabled in the hope of incentivizing them to choose euthanasia in order to spare the money and effort of looking after them and has already lead to at least one major lawsuit over the practice in Ontario.
• King George V had been euthanized during his agony by Dr. Lord Bertrand Dawson by increasing the dose of painkiller morphine to lethal levels.
  At about 11 o'clock it was evident that the last stage might endure for many hours, unknown to the patient but little comporting with the dignity and serenity which he so richly merited and which demanded a brief final scene. Hours of waiting just for the mechanical end when all that is really life has departed only exhausts the onlookers and keeps them so strained that they cannot avail themselves of the solace of thought, communion, or prayer. I therefore decided to determine the end and injected (myself) morphia gr. 3/4 and shortly afterwards cocaine gr. 1 into the distended jugular vein - Dr. Dawson's diary
• The case of Betty Williams is regarded as this: a "fast", imaginative young woman is said to have been suicidal and asks her ex-boyfriend to kill her.
• A well-known case in Spain is Ramón Sampedro, who after an accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down at the age of 25 and his attempts in different courts to have recognized his right to end his life had failed, finally died from cyanide poisoning assisted by a friend.
• Often used as an excuse when parents murder their disabled children. Mostly a subversion, as the child practically never wants to die.
• In some circles, hunting to stabilize a population (of animals) in an ecosystem is considered this, as, if the population gets too big, then it means mass starvation, disease, and overall destruction of the ecosystem as a whole. Especially justified, as most of the places this needs to be done are areas where humans eliminated most or all of the predators that would normally keep the population stable.
• In the areas of human medical practices, this is considered one of the most haunting experiences any caretaker can do with no other choice. For example: rabies is a gradual and torturous disease, the disease COMPLETELY inverts the No Biochemical Barriers trope, hiding in the victim until they begin to feel the symptoms. Heavy research has difficulty on containing and understanding the history of the disease due to pushing their victims into Forced into Evil and And I Must Scream territories, which many late-stage victims describing the pain as Not-Fire.
• Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard used assisted suicide in Switzerland (it is legalized there) due to suffering from multiple kinds of pain in his old age.
• When author Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers, he was quite open about his desire to be able to choose when he would die, and he became a public advocate for assisted suicide (although he disliked that term for it). His 2010 Richard Dimbleby Lecture "Shaking Hands With Death" and 2011 documentary Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die both dealt with the subject openly. However, Sir Terry found that his cognitive processes were not declining as badly as expected, and he was able to dictate when physically unable to write, so in the end he died from physical complications from his condition rather than choosing to end his life sooner.

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