Murder Between Consenting Adults? Has Individual Freedom Run Amok?

By Denise Noe

Many years ago, I saw a Dick Cavett show (boy am I showing my age! For those born too late to remember the Olden Days, Cavett was a late night talk show host whose guests often discussed serious issues) in which guests were debating the issue of pornography. The people opposed to censoring or banning porn made the usual points about it being “victimless.” One of those who wanted to ban such materials said, “If you only had laws against crimes that have victims, you’d have laws against murder and very little else.”

Cavett commented, “I guess you couldn’t very well have murder between consenting adults” and the audience laughed.

But apparently you can. In Germany now, the killer and cannibal Armin Meiwes is using precisely that as his defense. He freely admits that he killed, dismembered and ate 43-year-old Bernd Juergen Brandes. Indeed, he could hardly deny it since he preserved the killing on videotape and still had pieces of Brandes’s body in his freezer when arrested. However, Meiwes’ attorneys argue that this was not murder because the dead man agreed to be killed. In fact, Brandes had answered an advertisement Meiwes had placed on the internet seeking a man willing to be slaughtered and cannibalized. According to Meiwes’ lawyers, the victim’s consent made this a “killing on request” under German law, an illegal euthanasia punishable by a sentence of from six months to five years of incarceration.

Prosecutors do not dispute that the victim agreed to his own death but argue that he may not have been of sound mind. They seek to have Meiwes convicted the murder and sentenced to the maximum possible term of life in prison since Germany has no death penalty.

Meiwes himself has said, “It’s not like I killed someone who didn’t want to get killed.”
In the decades since the 1960s, liberals have repeated the mantra that “whatever two consenting adults want to do in the privacy of their own homes is no one else’s business providing they aren’t hurting anyone else.” As an early supporter of both women’s liberation and gay liberation, I have said this myself.

Did Armin Meiwes and the man he destroyed carry this to its logical conclusion? Meiwes did his gruesome work in privacy. The victim repeatedly urged Meiwes to cut him up and objected to nothing that went on the night of his death.

Was anyone else harmed? It might be possible to see the victim’s loved ones as “harmed” but liberals typically reject harm to the family as a reason to limit individual autonomy. That society was harmed by the death of a member seems obvious but, again, rarely do champions of personal choice allow individual choices to be legally restricted because of an ambiguous possible injury to the wider world.

Perhaps political and social liberals need to rethink our principles. Does the last stop for complete personal freedom of choice lie in Armin Meiwes’ freezer?

A previous version of this was published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution