For those unfamiliar with the charges against Barbara Mancini regarding her role in the death of her father, please check our previous coverage here, here and here.
The latest news on the case is that Mancini is still facing assisted suicide charges and awaiting a judge’s decision on a petition to dismiss the case.
Beyond that, the big news – beyond this case – is that C & C has used this opportunity to start a new line of fundraising. From the article, “Philly nurse charged with assisted suicide gets help with legal bills“:
Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit focused on end of life choices, has started a legal defense fund for a Philadelphia nurse charged with assisted suicide.
Barbara Mancini administered morphine to her 93-year-old father in February at his request. He was in hospice care at the time and had a prescription for the morphine.
When he died four days later, his daughter was arrested. She’s now facing a 10-year prison sentence.
Mancini acted appropriately as her father’s legal decision maker, said Mickey MacIntyre, chief program officer for Compassion & Choices.
“Compassion & Choices established a general legal defense fund in order to help the families like the Mancinis who suffer legal costs, as well as to cover other advocacy costs,” said MacIntyre. (Emphasis added.)
Most donors probably aren’t going to be reading the fine print – and the article doesn’t expand on what “other advocacy costs” means. Donors, though, can not be sure their dollars are going just to defense costs, judging from MacIntyre’s own words. At the very least, there’s no doubt that this new fundraising tool will be useful in building a database of people who have shown themselves willing to donate to C & C’s advocacy.
I”m in this, too, btw:
According to Stephen Drake of Not Dead Yet, an organization opposing legalization of assisted suicide, barbiturates are more effective and more commonly used than opiates, such as morphine, for individuals intending to assist with a suicide.
The Mancini case shouldn’t be prosecuted, said Drake, because it doesn’t fit the parameters of assisted suicide and will be hard to prove.
“It helps to perpetuate the illusion that prosecutions like this are common and they’re not, they’re very rare,” said Drake, a research analyst.
Context: Specifically, I said that one troubling aspect of the case is that it perpetuates the myth that generous morphine use in hospice shortens people’s lives – and it’s a myth that pro-assisted suicide advocates like to perpetuate. Opiates aren’t “reliable” in causing deaths – that’s why barbiturates are used in the states that have legalized assisted suicide.
And I’ll say it again. Prosecutions like this are rare. And unless there’s compelling evidence that hasn’t been made public, the prosecutor will have an impossible time convincing a jury that the morphine Barbara Mancini’s father took actually killed him, let alone the issue of whether or not her giving him his own medication rises to a level of illegal assistance in a suicide – or attempted suicide.
This was probably the wrong case for NDY to get involved in. While your points are clear–and so is the NDY position–there’s just no way any of this comes out right. The case sounds very muddy indeed, but the “not the right case for prosecution” and “why prosecute when we should be doing this for everyone” is easily confused. So I’d think this one was not the case which makes the NDY position clear and important.
Tom,
Sorry for the delay with posting and responding to your comment. We’ve been having trouble with a flood of spam and that’s been making the comments section as a whole a bit glitchy.
Our involvement with the case is limited to the comments I’ve made – which resulted from a call to us (I think the first was from Frank Bruni). At that point, I had three choices – “no comment,” agree with the prosecution, or lay out the issue of prosecutorial discretion and why it’s surprising to see a case get pushed so hard. None are great choices. I also provided a lot of other info to reporters I talked to on this case, but of course, none of that made their articles or columns.