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 college professor from Scottsdale, had committed manslaughter by aiding suicide as one of Van Voorhis’ “exit guides,” or whether he was guilty of conspiring with Egbert to help her kill herself.
Langsner had no comment. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said they would retry his case.
Why was it unsurprising? For one thing, important information was kept from the jury:
On its website, Final Exit states that “mentally competent adults have a basic human right to end their lives when they suffer from a fatal or irreversible illness or intractable pain, when their quality of life is personally unacceptable, and the future holds only hopelessness and pain.”
According to attorneys and her family, Van Voorhis suffered from mental illness but was not suffering from physical illnesses, a fact kept from the jury.
I’ll never get this. Part of the defense claims involved the careful “screening” process that FEN says they use. The knowledge that Van Voorhis had no serious physical illness would have belied the claim of any kind of “screening” process – and it might have made the jury view other claims of the group more sceptically. (Personally, it really doesn’t matter to NDY if Van Voorhis was “mentally ill” or not. We’re opposed to the facilitation and encouragement of suicide regardless of whatever diagnoses may or may not be involved.)
I can only hope the prosecution in Georgia makes a stronger case in the courtroom. –Stephen Drake
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:
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.
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
On March 21st, the Monterey County Herald published an op-ed by Neil Shapiro, which was, until the last paragraph, a fairly unremarkable and unoriginal promotion of legalized assisted suicide. The author praised Jack Kevorkian and the states of Oregon and Washington – the two states that have legalized physician-prescribed suicide for people believed to have less than six months to live.
In fact, reading through the bulk of the article, I was hard put to understand the justification for the title given the piece from some newspaper staffer – “Right to die gives dignity to disabled.”
Shapiro didn’t mention that most of Kevorkian’s body count consisted of people with disabilities or nonterminal chronic conditions, so that wouldn’t account for the title. The statutes in Oregon and Washington claim to limit “eligibility” to “terminally ill” individuals. So why was the title referring to “disabled” people?
The rationale for the title only became clear when I got to the last paragraph, which reads as a gratuitous jab at California disability rights activists who have been very helpful in fighting legalization efforts in that state.
There is a great irony in all of this. Those who are not incapacitated are physically able to commit suicide, and need no assistance. Those who require, but are routinely denied, that assistance are the disabled. We spend billions of dollars making sure that they have the same right as the rest of us to shop, visit the beach and the like, but we deny them the right to die with dignity. Go figure.
Where do I begin? If it were up to my neighbors as Shapiro puts it, I would have been denied an education. I would not be able to get on a bus or plane. I would not have a job or be father. We people with a disability had to fight for these fundamental rights. Even though we people with a disability are supposedly equal I have never felt that way—ever. The idea of equality for people with a disability is illusive at best. As for the billions of dollars spent on access, which Shapiro seems to resent, has saved countless lives, mine included. But just because we spend money on access and inclusion does not mean we value the people who are supposedly equal and included. When it comes to disability rights, as a society we merely pay lip service to these inherent civil rights most take for granted. We do not in reality accept the presence of people with a disability.
It’s hard to believe it’s been about a month since I’ve written here. Various health issues have kept me away from the keyboard, although I’ve been monitoring news and other information sources. I just haven’t had the energy to write. I’ll be doing my best to catch up over the next few weeks – there will probably be days when I publish two posts or more.
This op-ed from the Irish Times is especially appropriate. As you’ll read, it has a lot to do with breathing – and the not-so-shocking feeling that the writer feels it’s better to breathe than not breathe – better to be alive than be dead. We’ve been appreciating those simple (to us, anyway) truths in our own household. The author of the piece highlighted below found that his desire to go on breathing met with considerable resistance from the medical team treating him.
YOU’RE IN A room in Dublin. A man walks in whom you’ve never met. He starts to talk to you. He asks you if you have any children. You say you do. He tells you not to go home tonight. That when you leave the building you must turn right instead of left, head north instead of south. That you must keep going in an unknown direction, knowing only that you will never see anyone from your life again. The journey he is asking you to take is death.
Fitzmaurice describes the “talk” in detail:
I am in a bed in the Beacon Hospital. I came in with pneumonia and three days of no sleep and continuous coughing left me exhausted and unable to breathe. Moved into intensive care, I went into respiratory failure, collapsed unconscious and was put on a ventilator.
I now have a tube up my nose and a tube down my throat. One for feeding, one for breathing. Both of which prevent me from speaking. Motor neurone disease prevents me from moving my arms and legs. I communicate with my family through text messages on my phone.
A man has just walked in the door. I have never met him before and he starts to speak to me. He says his name is John Magner, consultant anaesthetist for the ICU. He tells me he has just got off the phone from Prof Orla Hardiman in Beaumont Hospital, after I requested that he ring them to ensure that I was getting the best care for MND in the Beacon.
He tells me that Prof Hardiman has said that they do not advocate ventilation (see panel) in this country for MND patients. That it is time for me to make the hard choice. He tells me that there have only been two cases of invasive home ventilation, but in both cases the people were extremely wealthy.
My mother and my wife start crying in the corner of the room. I look at him but I cannot reply. He looks at me. “This is it now for you. It is time for you to make the hard choice, Simon.” My mother and my wife are now holding each other, sobbing.
Before I continue with excerpts from Fitzmaurice’s essay, people unfamiliar with the Irish health care system might want to know that it’s a single-payer system – overseen by the HSE – Health Service Executive. I haven’t checked around yet, but I am pretty sure that some conservative bloggers will pick this story up and hold it up as an example of “rationing” imposed by a centralized, single-payer system run by the government.
As you’ll see, this is not one of those stories. The barriers faced by Fitzmaurice had nothing to do with policies of the HSE – but had everything to do with the attitudes of medical professionals regarding “quality of life.” More here:
While he is looking at me, my life force, my soul, the part of me that feels like every part, is unequivocal. I want to live. It infuses my whole body to such an extent that I feel no fear in the face of this man. We find out two days later that the home ventilator is covered by the HSE, while the home care package needed to run it can be funded between my family and the HSE. (Emphasis added.)
As he makes clear later, Fitzmaurice and his family feel they’ve gotten terrific support from the HSE – it was the doctors who – to put it mildly – discouraged his choice to live with invasive ventilation. I guess bioethicists would call that encouraging him to make an “end of life” decision – it’s anybody’s guess what they call the decision they didn’t want him to make.
Long story short – Mr. Fitzmaurice is at home, happily enjoying his life with his wife, children and the rest of his family, as this wonderful picture shows:
(The picture above shows Simon Fitzmaurice in bed, attached to his ventilator, with three sons lying beside him)
Read the rest of the article, along with additional material from sources like the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association, whose spokesperson makes it clear the association doesn’t advocate use of trach ventilation.
I’ll also add that Mr. Fitzmaurice believes that medical professionals in other countries are more supportive of the choice to use invasive ventilation. Maybe, but it seems that many of the people I know who use any kind of breathing assistance up had to bring the issue up themselves – mostly, the options weren’t offered by their physicians.
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 post on this, which I’ll be quoting later on, he blasts the concept – a sentiment I wholeheartedly share. In the second post, he describes the unmentioned history that the NY Times has with Longo and discredited former reporter Michael Finkel.
While I was surprised at this particular promoter of this proposal getting published in the NY Times, it really wasn’t that surprising to see the idea of death row prisoners as an untapped source of organ donors being pushed in their pages.
This issue resurfaces from time to time, usually around media coverage of a specific death row inmate making the request – wanting to donate organs after his or her death or a kidney while alive.
But right now we might be seeing a deliberate push to popularize this idea by at least one player with both money and media savvy. See, I’ve been meaning to write something about this topic since last February. February 14th, to be exact.
I was working at home that day with the TV tuned to MSNBC in the background. I got distracted by the TV when I heard Dylan Ratigan say something about debating death row organ donors after the break. This was kind of weird. Ratigan generally covers issues related to business and the economy, and he’s pretty good when he sticks to his comfort zone. This was a bizarre topic for his show. Ratigan’s guests were bioethicist Eric Meslin and Ben Goldhirsh, the CEO of Good:
If you highlight selections at the bottom of the video screen, accurate subtitles will run on the video – there is also a selection for a transcript.
This was no “debate” on the issue. Both Meslin and Goldhirsh gave their one-sided arguments in favor of allowing organ donations from Death Row inmates. Ratigan, who is generally very articulate, animated and aggressive when on his turf, was clearly over his head and offered virtually nothing in the way of counter-arguments. It had about as much lively “debate” as I imagine Larry King exchanging views on collective bargaining with the Koch brothers would have.
To me, one of the most important points of discussion that should occur when this idea is floated has to do with what kind of impact the practice would have on the implementation of the death penalty by juries who would know this was a possible benefit. There is no way I can improve on Wesley Smith’s concerns about the impact of this proposal if it was adopted:
Think very carefully about this. Do we want the society to have an increased stake in executing prisoners? No. Even if one is for the death penalty, the issue should be strictly limited to crime and punishment. Do we want prisoners deciding to give up appeals early–as here–so their organs are more uselful, because even if they win, they face life in prison? No. Such a system could subtly skew the system against justice and toward the view that the organs of these murderers matter more than their lives. It could also impact other condemned prisoners depressed or bored on death row, who would be celebrated if they decided to allow themselves to be killed for their organs–as in the adamantly anti-death penalty Times is facilitating by publishing this piece. Ah, the noble wife and family killer!
But by using what the bioethicist Arthur Caplan calls “the Mayan Protocol”—a term derived from the ancient Mayan practice of vivisecting their human sacrifices—the removal of organs would itself be the method of execution. If this sounds inhumane, compare it to current practices: botched hangings, painfully long gassings, and messy electrocutions. Removal of the heart, lungs, and kidneys (under anesthesia, of course) would kill every time, without an instant of pain.
So far, the organs of all criminals executed in the United States have stayed with their original owners. Consider the loss. Someone died waiting for that killer’s heart. Two died waiting for his kidneys, and two more suffocated for lack of his lungs. The liver, split two ways, could have saved two babies. Take the hair, bone, skin, ligaments, and fluids for grafts and transfusions, and all that’s left of the donor’s body could be shuffled off into a very petite coffin indeed. The inmate could allow nearly a dozen people to live, in exchange for a body he wouldn’t be around to enjoy anyway. The math says we should encourage death-row organ donation.
I received confirmation from Art Caplan that he did use the term “Mayan Protocol” and has argued against this proposal whenever he’s encountered it.
I reacted to this article when it was first published, when I became aware of it through a post to bioethic.net. There was another aspect – an omission – that struck me at the time and still strikes me as dishonest and most likely intentional, as I’ll go into a bit later.
Until the segment of Dylan Ratigan’s show, I figured that the issue had deservedly faded away. It turns out I was wrong.
In June 2009, “Good” unveiled a short animated feature based on Wood’s article, titled “Let’s Harvest the Organs of Death Row Inmates.” It’s available on Good’s website, but the embedded video below is from their Youtube channel. Sorry – they don’t provide a transcript or subtitles, I guess “Good” doesn’t figure accessibility is a “good” enough idea to bother with.
I figure it was that last bit of promotion that brought the issue to the attention of the producers of Ratigan’s show and probably the NY Times as well.
The film version makes it clear that the protocol for organ harvesting involves putting a prisoner under general anesthesia and then removing the organs. The organ removal would be the cause of death.
If that sounds familiar to readers of this blog, it should. In his own blog, Wesley Smith noted that Jack Kevorkian advocated for this decades ago. Specifically, in the 1950s, Kevorkian advocated letting death row inmates become subjects to lethal medical experiments under anesthesia. In the mid-1970s, he switched gears and started advocating organ donation for death row prisoners under general anesthesia.
All anyone needs to do to confirm this is to check the Amazon listing for Kevorkian’s “Prescription: Medicide,” published in 1991:
(From the 1991 Publishers Weekly review on the Amazon page linked above)
Kevorkian gained notoriety last year when he performed the first publicly acknowledged “physician-assisted suicide” by helping Janet Adkins, a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, take her own life. The method of death was the Mercitron, the “suicide machine” Kevorkian invented, which enables a person to self-administer a lethal injection. In this self-dramatizing, often strident manifesto he argues that “medicide,” his term for doctor-assisted suicide, is an ethical option that should be extended not only to the infirm or terminally ill, but also to inmates on death row. Condemned prisoners, he maintains, should, if they choose, be executed via general anesthesia, with the option of donating organs or having their intact bodies used for medical experimentation. (emphasis added)
Frankly, both the article by Graeme Wood and especially the animated feature come very close to plagiarism – relating Kevorkian’s exact protocol without giving him any credit for it.
It turns out there are a number of online sites devoted to information on this topic. None that I’ve found mention any of Kevorkian’s numerous articles on the subject or the 1991 book cited above. For example, Eric Meslin, the bioethicist who appeared on Ratigan’s show to pitch death row organ donation, has a page devoted to the subject. Anything by Kevorkian on the subject is conspicuously absent. How is that? It seems to me that someone who is some kind of “expert” on this subject would know about Kevorkian’s devoted and long-term advocacy, which left a long paper trail, and in that case the omission would be deliberate. Someone unfamiliar with Kevorkian’s work in this area has no basis to call themselves an expert.
I’m guessing that the consistent omission of Kevorkian’s material by advocates of the “Mayan Protocol” is deliberate. My guess is that no advocate wants to put people off further by associating Kevorkian’s name with it.
The thing is, I doubt that Graeme Wood has to worry about Kevorkian complaining about theft of intellectual property – even though Kevorkian’s been moved to what would seem like outrageous tirades for less. And he probably won’t be complaining for having been erased from the history of advocacy of organ donations of death row prisoners via the “Mayan Protocol,” even though he was a trailblazer in terms of his advocacy.
Ironically, Kevorkian and his current boosters, groupies and handlers have worked diligently to erase that part of Kevorkian’s past. As discussed on this blog, the HBO docudrama “You Don’t Know Jack” played fast and loose with the facts of his life, mostly by omitting the creepiest parts, such as his decades-long advocacy involving death row prisoners. The so-called “documentary” of Kevorkian avoided the same uncomfortable areas.
So, ironically, it would seem that Jack Kevorkian’s supporters are doing their best to make sure that while they boost Kevorkian and assisted suicide, they do their best to prevent people from knowing those parts of Kevorkian’s past in an effort not to creep people out. Kevorkian appears to be cooperating with these revisionist efforts in regard to his life.
OTOH, advocates of death row organ donation are doing their best to make sure that no one knows about Kevorkian’s pioneering role in this advocacy – probably because they don’t want to creep people out.
Yeah – the irony, it burns! It also nauseates. –Stephen Drake
