Apparent Mercy Killing a Test of Oregon Assisted Suicide Limits
John Roberts has been arrested for murdering his wife Virginia in Oregon. Why is this important? His brother claims that John killed Virginia as an act of compassion because she had Lou Gehrig's disease and didn't want to wait to die until she would have qualified for legal assisted suicide. From the story:
Friends and family of John Roberts, the Gresham man arrested in the death of his wife, Virginia, say her death Saturday was not a cold-blooded attack but an act of compassion for a woman living with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease. John Roberts' brother and daughter and a close family friend told The Oregonian that Virginia's ALS had worsened in the weeks leading to her death on Saturday. They say John Roberts hinted to them that Virginia had asked him to help take her life when she no longer wished to carry on...This is the kind of case that led to the complete collapse of euthanasia guideline enforcement in the Netherlands. And I predict: If this is the defense, if Mr. Roberts admits killing his wife for purposes of mercy at her request--he may be convicted of something like manslaughter, but will not be meaningfully punished. After all, the only thing he did was provide "aid in dying" a little earlier than would have otherwise been provided under the law. And so what if it wasn't "self administered" or overseen by a doctor: What is it about "choice" that we don't understand?
"There is a story that makes this not just a murder," said Greg Roberts, a former Seattle police detective and John Roberts' brother. "It is my firm belief that this was a pact between the two of them, that she asked him to do this. "And part of the reason why they chose this method rather than going down the assisted suicide route was that she was so proud that she didn't want to let herself get into the condition she would need to be in before they'd be allowed" to participate in Oregon's Death with Dignity program, which requires a person to be within six months of death. (My emphasis.)
If Roberts killed his wife and despite a "mercy killing" defense is seriously punished, I will post it as the state taking the assisted suicide guidelines seriously. But I am betting--again assuming the assertions in the story are true--that Mr. Roberts will do little if any jail time for shooting his wife. This is the tide unleashed when we agree in law that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering.
Labels: Oregon Mercy Killing
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 1:24 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
Heaven help us! We as a nation are responsible for the death of 48.5 million unborn babies since 1973. That's about 4,000 babies a day...tortured to death...and about 3 every 20 seconds!
If this man is NOT punished you can bet that there will be many more deaths....people of all ages! We are worse than Nazi Germany!
And I have to live in this state!!!!
Jan -
We're not worse than Germany *yet* - we still have the legal right to protest and change minds, to elect people who think differently from the pro-euthanasia groups, and we can fight legally against people trying to kill us and our loved ones.
But we're on the way down.
www.myspace.com/salvatorecrisafulli
Who am: "the Italian Terri Schiavo"
(so they said famous physicians, in a popular Telecast as "Hands to Door")
I am Salvatore Crisafulli, today 42 years in Catania that I have lived for almost two years in been Vegetative Permanent (for the medical science) and that I/you/they have succeeded, (thanks to the help of my relatives) to go out of the tunnel of the Permanent Vegetative State and subsequently telling that me, in that period I understood and I felt everything. I succeed in communicating only thanks to a computer, selecting with the eyes the letters on the screen.
I were born so, with my direct testimony, the book "With the blocked eyes" that it reconstructs footstep for footstep the whole story of that that I/you/they then have been nicknamed the «Italian Terri Schiavo».
My history, is a history done of hope and of courage of tenacity and of will power. After years I have succeeded in convincing physicians to have returned to the life.
The morning of 11 September of 2003, to Catania, I am accompanying to school, in wasp, one of my 4 children, 13 year-old Anthony. Then my awful impact against the van of a gelataio: both in the hospital and in coma
My child wakes up again him after few days, me after 7 months but I find me imprisoned in my same body.
I don't remember anything of the accident, but I understand to be at home of my brother Pietro in Tuscany, finding again me incapable to move me and to speak
I saw my relatives stir around my bed, I wanted to recall their attention shouting, but from my mouth it didn't go out some sound.
In the house of my brother Pietro in the province of Pistoia we lived in eleven with the only economic support of the pension of my mother.
Varied hospitals they refuse my refuge, the physicians spoke of is vegetative permanent and irreversible. I felt the physicians say that my death was only matter of time, and I began to open and to close the eyes to attract the attention of whom was around me.
Plain Pian began the phase of my awakening, that traveled on two plain parallels, that physically personal, of which plain pian I took conscience of what you/he/she was happened me, slowly tasting my return to the life and that extreme, in which I try to convince to whom is around me to be really still alive and flourishing, but I was me unable prisoner in my body that didn't answer me.
I understood what happened around me, but I could not speak, I didn't succeed in moving legs, braccia anything wanted to do, "I/you/they are imprisoned in my same body." I try with all of my desperation, with the weeping, with the eyes but nothing, the physicians truncated every hope, for them I was a "vegetable" and that my ocular movements were alone casual, in short I was not conscious.
But it was not this way. And' is my mother to realize for of it before. One day they enter the room my mother, my brothers, my sister-in-law and a cousin, asking to open me and to close the eyes to answer to their questions
The experiment succeeds, in fact they realized that I understood them and I felt, but I could communicate only through the movement of the eyelids. From this moment, all of my family, with in head my brother Pietro they will fight for over one year with the sanitary institutions to succeed in making to hospitalize me, trying in every way of showing that I was conscious. In that period, my brother Pietro equips a room of his/her house as a hospital and is improvised nurse keeping on fighting.
With a camper it brought around me for Italy and for Europe, looking for the confirmation of an expert. We arrived thin to Innsbruck, in Austria, from a luminary: and I remember everything, the famous physician began to beat me with a hammers on my knees, and you/he/she stung me with a needle under the nose, but also this teacher affirms that I was not able to understand nothing. And' an awful mazzata.
In my slow repurchase to the life, the role of my family has been fundamental that have not lost never the hope attending with trust toward god my awakening. An immense praise goes to my brother Pietro that during the debate of Terri Schiavo, it launched a dramatic appeal to the institutions, with my consent. “If nobody helped us it disconnected the plug” so it said my brother.
Someone finally listened to my family: it intervened in first person the Minister of the Health and, after few days, the I am hospitalized to "St. Donato" of Arezzo. The refuge, is recognized here, finally, two months later conscious. The cares bring notable improvements.
To this point, I ask a further effort myself. Through a computer, selecting with the eyes the letters on the screen, I affirm that: "I want to tell my experience to the world. I want that all know what he/she means to live paralysed on a bed, without being able him to move neither to speak, with the physicians that say that you don't understand anything. I want to make to help him myself, the people as me and their relatives."
To compose the words, has to attend every time that all the letters of the alphabet flow me in front of the eyes to be able to select that volute. To give the answer to a single question, at times it takes a whole day, especially in the first times, when memoirs and tears of emotion mix together him.
It' is fatiguing with the help of a journalist and my brother it is born so my book "With the blocked eyes" I edit from l’Airone.
Today my actual conditions are: I don't succeed in speaking yet, I am putting her/it all, the morning as soon as I wake up myself, I for example send forth some syllables as but-but pa-but pe if. I communicate thanks to a computer and really thanks to the new technology I can make to listen communicate with the external world.
I want what has happened to me, not to happen anymore. So many have written me speaking of their relatives to the same conditions that don't even come assisted.
Idea is to create a foundation to which you/they can be turned for asking help and possession a best life.
Today I am completely contrary to the euthanasia.
michelbladis: Thanks for sharing that. Another case like this is Kate Adamson. She even wrote a book about it called Kate's Journey.
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