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 of the trial has been published in the Phoenix New Times. Paul Rubin, writing the reports, has been covering the death of Jana Van Voorhis and the resulting criminal charges against four FEN members for over three and a half years now. Two FEN members entered into plea agreements and have testified for the prosecution.
Below is a list of Rubin’s articles on the trial, from oldest to most recent:
- Final Exit Network Members Going on Trial After 2007 Assisted Suicide of Phoenix Woman
- Final Exit Network Defendant Portrayed Alternately as “The Godfather” and “Great Humanitarian” as Trial Begins
- Final Exit Network Murder Trial Continues This Week — Prosecution Faces Uphill Struggle
- Final Exit Network Murder Trial: Senior “Exit Guide” Testifies for Prosecution — Kind of Gets Help From “Right To Die” Group Insider
- “Right To Die” Case Closing Arguments Scheduled Monday After Defense Calls It a Day
- Final Exit Network Murder Case Should Go to Jury Today
From the last story, some definitions and omissions that the jury will have to struggle with:
Deputy county attorney Patrick Johnson told the panel that the Final Exit defendants’ intent was clear.“We’re not talking about an ignorant organization,” the young prosecutor said. “They’re smart people. They know know, and they knew they were breaking the law…They knew full well what they were doing.”Don Samuel, a Georgia attorney serving as one of Egbert’s lawyers, argued that “this is not a Gambino crime family, like the Maria or something…[Final Exit] is not a group that encourages, actively participates, or advises anybody to commit suicide.”The veteran attorney obviously knows that the word “advises” may come back to haunt the defendant, and he smartly tried to deal with it head-on.One of Judge McMurdie’s jury instructions says that “to aid” means “to assist in the commission of an act.” That assistance can include both “active participation” and “advising the person to commit suicide.”The definition of “advice” is fraught with possible interpretation, as the evidence unquestionably showed that both Langsner and his onetime co-defendant Wye Hale-Rowe were intimately involved with Jana Van Voorhis’ demise.One point worth noting as the jurors begin to deliberate: For legal reasons, they never learned that Van Voorhis was not seriously physically ill when she committed suicide, but was suffering from long-term mental illness.
Personally, I’m not as concerned about the jury not hearing about Van Voorhis’ “long term mental illness” as I am about the omission of the very pertinent information that she “was not seriously physically ill.” Since FEN claims to screen applicants by reviewing medical records it could cast doubt on both their – to say the least – attention to detail and the veracity of any other claims made on or off the witness stand.
Paul Rubin is writing that he isn’t sure that 8 people (the number of jury members in deliberation) can come to a unanimous decision on the charges in this case.
Meanwhile, the AP has news from Georgia:
Intro to article:
A Georgia judge rejected a free-speech challenge to the state’s law against assisted suicide, allowing a high-profile case to proceed against four members of a suicide group charged with helping a cancer-stricken man kill himself.
Forsyth County Superior Court Judge David Dickinson said in the opinion released Wednesday that “pure speech is in no way chilled or limited” by the law, siding with prosecutors in the state’s case against four Final Exit Network members.
“The court understands that defendants contend that the statute criminalizes only speech,” the judge wrote in the 13-page ruling. “However, the court finds that the statute requires both speech and an overt act in furtherance of assisting in the suicide.”
There’s more in the article, but the upshot is that there will be a trial in Georgia. Four members face various charges relating to their alleged roles in the death of John Celmer. –Stephen Drake