A sentient machine, or automatons, is destroying one akin to murder?

The other day I was looking at some news blurb (on TV or the Net, I can’t remember) that was showing the advances in robotics. They were showing robots that could mimic the physical movements of humans. If man were to mate one of these automatons with a brain that could think, or make the automaton aware of itself, would pulling the plug on one be akin to murdering it? It would not be as simple as flicking off a power switch, etc., the machine would know it was being deactivated, or destroyed and its existence may be no more.