sean davison

Sean is a South African citizen who first came to South Africa from New Zealand in 1991 to carry out research in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Cape Town. In 1994 he took up an academic post at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), where he is currently Professor in the Department of Biotechnology. His lab identifies individuals from highly degraded DNA and identified the anti-apartheid activists exhumed from mass graves revealed during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.

Sean Davison was the co-founder of the Innocence Project SA, an organisation that seeks the exoneration of wrongfully imprisoned people on the basis of DNA testing that was not done at the time of their trial.

Sean Davison published a book The Last Waltz: Love, Death & Betrayal which described the three months he spent with his mother before she died. A manuscript copy of this book revealing that, at the request of his terminally-ill mother, a medical doctor, he gave her crushed morphine tablets in a glass of water was leaked to the police. As a consequence of this he was arrested and went on trial for the attempted murder of his mother. During his high court trial he was offered a lesser charge of assisted suicide which he pleaded guilty to and was ordered to serve a five month house arrest sentence in Dunedin, New Zealand. Sean’s trial ignited debate on voluntary euthanasia in both South Africa and New Zealand.

In 2011, he co-founded the organisation DignitySA which seeks a law change in South Africa to allow for assisted dying for people with unbearable suffering with no hope of recovery.

In 2018 he was arrested and charged with three counts of premeditated murder. In 2019, in a plea bargain with the court he received a three-year house arrest sentence and was banned from speaking to the media.