Woman, 64, who killed two ailing sons, gets plea deal
Under the plea entered in Spalding County Courthouse, 64-year-old Carol Carr will serve up to five years in state prison for violating a law that prohibits aiding in a suicide. It was one of the first such convictions in Georgia.
In exchange, county prosecutors agreed to drop murder charges against Carr, who turned herself in June 8 after shooting her terminally ill sons, Randy Scott, 42, and Andy Scott, 41, as they lay in a nursing home in the town of Griffin, about 40 miles south of Atlanta. The two were in advanced stages of the degenerative disease.
Carr, who has been held without bail since her arrest, will be eligible for parole in about a year. She had faced the possibility of life in prison if convicted at trial on murder charges that were handed down by a Spalding County grand jury last August.
The case was "difficult from everyone's perspective," said Spalding County District Attorney William McBroom. "You have a woman that never has done any kind of criminal act. She's 64, and has health problems. But she's killed two people. You can't condone that and let her go."
McBroom said a trial could have ended with a hung jury if one or more jurors sympathized with Carr. By the same token, he said, Carr risked spending the rest of her life behind bars by facing a jury. "Both sides gave up something," the prosecutor said of the plea agreement.
"It's a classic example of the old legal adage that you should always temper justice with mercy," Carr's lawyer, Lee Sexton, said after a court session. "She believes she was 100 percent right — it was her duty. But legally, she knew it violated the law."
The case underlined the toll of Huntington's disease, a hereditary brain disorder that erodes a person's ability to perform basic functions, such as walking, speaking or even thinking clearly, and in the end it proves fatal.
Carr provided a particularly poignant symbol. Her husband, Hoyt, died of Huntington's in 1995 after a long struggle. The disease also struck the husband's mother, along with a sister and brother.
"We are heartened that Mrs. Carr will not have to face a trial for the murder of her two sons who suffered from Huntington's disease," said Barbara Boyle, national executive director of the Huntington's Disease Society of America. She urged caregivers facing severe pressures to contact the society.
Carr had vowed that she would not let the two sons succumb in the same manner as her husband.