On October 7th, Kelli Stapleton will be sentenced for First Degree Child Abuse in a Michigan courtroom. The following is a summary of the facts written by attorney Sam Crane regarding Kelli Stapleton’s attempt to kill her autistic daughter and the aftermath in the media and public discourse. It provides the background and context for […]
Thanks to Joe Stramondo, who found this article and alerted me to it. (Joe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University where he is specializing in bioethics, disability studies, and moral psychology. He has presented at meetings of the Society for Disability Studies, the American Society for Bioethics and […]
It’s been awhile since we’ve written about the Final Exit Network (FEN), but there are new developments in the criminal case against members of the group. You can read earlier posts on the case in Minnesota here, here, here and here. Here’s an excerpt from a summary on NPR on the Frontline site (Frontline producers […]
From the Baltimore Sun: HASTINGS, Minn. — A Minnesota grand jury has indicted a national right-to-die group and several members for their actions in the 2007 suicide of a suburban Minneapolis woman, prosecutors announced Monday. The 17-count indictment charges the medical director of Final Exit Network, Lawrence Egbert of Baltimore, and three other officials with […]
This is a story that has been developing over the past few days and it has more than a few twists. Here’s one of the most comprehensive news stories on the case from Wave3 News in Louisville, KY: ELIZABETHTOWN, KY (WAVE) – Was it assisted suicide or cold blooded murder? That’s the question Michele Daugherty’s friends have […]
As anyone who follows the news of old, ill, and disabled people who get killed by family members or “caregivers,” it’s all to clear that if the perpetrator claims the act was a “mercy killing,” it’s frequently a successful defense strategy. The public tends to believe that the victim would have wanted to die, even […]
Back on April 1, 1998 I sent out an obviously bogus press release from an email address I reserved for just such purposes. It was an attempt at some (I thought) outrageous satire, taking pro-assisted suicide arguments based on “quality of life” to one of their many logical conclusions. What would happen, I wondered, when […]
Disappointing, but not entirely unexpected news from Arizona: Lawrence Egbert, 83, an anesthesiologist from Baltimore, was found not guilty of conspiracy to commit manslaughter by aiding suicide in the April 2007 death of Jana Van Voorhis, 58. But the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision as to whether Franklin Langsner, 86, a retired […]
The long-awaited trial of two members of the Final Exit Network (FEN) relating to their roles in the death of Jana Van Voorhis is all but over – it’s all in the hands of the jury now after a roughly week-long trial at the Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona. The only ongoing press coverage […]
Wesley Smith has two related pieces on an op-ed by a death row prisoner that was published in the NY Times on March 6th. Christian Longo, who admits to being guilty of killing his wife and three children, wrote to the newspaper to promote voluntary organ donation by death row prisoners. In Wesley’s first blog […]
