In Lodi, California, June Hartley helped her brother kill himself with helium and a bag. She was charged with the felony of assisting suicide but is apparently going to get another in a series of slaps on the wrists of suicide assisters in such cases. From the story:
A Lodi woman who helped her ailing brother commit suicide pleaded guilty Thursday to a lesser charge that allows the judge wide latitude to determine the severity of her crime and punishment. June Hartley, 42, had been charged with assisting a suicide and causing injury leading to death for helping her brother, 45-year-old James Hartley, to acquire and inhale a lethal dose of helium in December. James Hartley, a musician, had endured a series of strokes that left him immobile and in constant pain.
June Hartley pleaded not guilty to those charges but never denied helping her brother to commit suicide. On Thursday in the courtroom of San Joaquin County Superior Court Judge Franklin Stephenson, she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of being an accessory to a crime, which could be ruled either a misdemeanor or a felony. The second charge will be dropped. Hartley’s plea is conditional; it would be withdrawn if the presiding judge rules it a felony or sentences Hartley to incarceration, said her attorney, Randy Thomas.
The case shows how prosecutors value the lives of people with disabilities who are despairing less than they do the lives of other suicidal people:
The prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Sherri Adams, said the plea agreement was just. Adams said the District Attorney’s Office must scrutinize cases of assisted suicide, which are illegal in California, to prevent malicious killings that are masked as merciful. Hartley’s actions, Adams said, were a genuine act of mercy. “This case did not involve any ill will,” Adams said. “The defendant violated the law out of love and support for her own brother.”
Can you imagine the same result if the suicidal person had wanted to die because his wife had left him, or his child was killed in an auto accident, or he had bi-polar disease? This is why the disability rights community is up in arms about assisted suicide: It illustrates the prevalent attitude–even among law enforcement–that death is better than disability and those who help are just doing the dead person a favor.
I have no doubt Hartley was in despair at her brother’s despair. But that’s not the point. Consider: In Switzerland assisted suicide is legal so long as the assisters have a”proper motive.” We now see where that leads; a rash of suicide tourism, suicide promoted as a proper response to serious disability, and a Swiss Supreme Court Decision making assisted suicide a constitutional right for the mentally ill. You know the old saying about with what the road to hell is paved.
And that finally brings us to the point of this post, an issue often neglected in the debate over assisted suicide: The Swiss debacle illustrates what eventually happens when assisted suicide is legalized in the context of a culture that has adopted as its overriding purpose of avoiding all suffering–ending suffering can all too easily translate into ending the sufferer. Thus, even a very weakly enforced criminal sanction serves a benficial prophylactic function and sends a life-affirming message that helping people kill themselves is wrong, while the threat of prosecution keeps such cases to the relatively few and far between. Legalize assisted suicide and in the end, killing as an acceptable answer to the problems of human suffering is validated, which can only result in more deaths.
June 7th, 2009 | 3:21 pm
I notice this thing about their “having to scrutinize the crimes” to make sure they aren’t “malicious” disguised as “merciful.” But assisted suicide itself is a crime in CA! For them to agree to a plea bargain like this on the grounds that it isn’t a disguised “malicious” crime is effectively to gut the law against assisted suicide itself. The whole point of assisted suicide is that one is (at least ostensibly) doing it at the other person’s request. Clearly the legislature intended “mercy killings” of exactly that sort to be illegal, and the prosecutors are blocking that intent.
June 7th, 2009 | 4:34 pm
Lydia: And these stories also never get into what attempts were made to involve suicide prevention, whether disability rights activists wre called to help out, etc.
June 7th, 2009 | 5:27 pm
What makes me laugh is the notion that someone can decide if a person is being malicious or merciful. If her brother had taken out a large life insurance policy on himself that left her the inheritor, then it’s more likely she’d have been charged with the first degree crime than with the plea bargain. Would it be any less “merciful” if she were getting some kind of compensation out of his death?
Granted, from what I understand, most states have laws stating that insurance companies don’t have to pay out for a suicide, but there are other means by which someone who claims to be “merciful” could actually be getting compensated.
June 7th, 2009 | 6:54 pm
A PROSECUTOR SAID THAT?????? Legislating from the bench was bad enough. Now it’s prosecutors. I don’t find it mere coincidence that things started falling apart around the same time a.d.a.s started being 12-year-old females. You can’t have standards about anything in a society whose standards and norms have been turned upside down left and right.
June 7th, 2009 | 6:56 pm
Not to mention, what in the dickens is a “proper motive”??? Very nice, very nice wording.
June 7th, 2009 | 7:55 pm
I don’t even know where to start cause the good lord has given me more than humanly possible to share here or on my blog in one post.
Really Victor?
Before I left for camp on Friday, I started reading one of your post about the doctor who was killed but I can no longer find “IT” now. I had commented in another blog regarding this matter saying in so many words that two wrongs could never make one right ect…..
To try and get back on topic which is not easy for me. I could talk about a girl who lost a sister and her sister also lost her son and had God not placed me there at the time she might have lost her life too. Like Jack would say, off topic and bragging. :)
Ok! How about me spending Saturday night at a hospital emergency room for over four hours and only got twelve stitches but I really gave many in the good people on occasions a laugh doing my Red Green when the occasion presented “IT”self. Still off topic Victor.
Ok! I’ll close by having you imagine three guys on a cross. Three of them were all very touch, one of them was also full of LOVE one found a spec of Love and the other thought that he was really “IT” and died his own death.
Give “IT” UP sinner vic cause Wesley only listens to me! :) Peace
June 7th, 2009 | 7:58 pm
Correction, I only got half a dozen stitches! See what I mean sinner vic dramatizes everything! :)Peace
June 8th, 2009 | 1:57 am
Bugs still are bothering us at SHS, Victor. The search function isn’t working properly. But to find older posts, hit the “search older posts” link at the bottom of the page.
Here’s the link to the other Tiller post:
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2009/05/31/murder-is-wrong-no-excuses-in-killing-of-george-tiller/
June 9th, 2009 | 5:00 pm
In addition to encouraging suicides, these kinds of rulings make it much easier to murder “suffering” people. Anyone who has a dreaded condition becomes open game. Your killer has only to persuade the court that you ‘wanted’ to be killed.
–> The temptation is now multiplied. Not only is there the patient despairing over the prospect of life with a difficult illness or injury. Perhaps your caregiver is overwhelmed at the task ahead — now the temptation to ‘put you out of your suffering’ is given free reign.
Chilling.
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