A sting operation this week led to the arrest of four members of one of the US's main assisted suicide groups, writes RICHARD FAUSSETin Atlanta
THE MAN told Thomas Goodwin he wanted to kill himself to end the pain of pancreatic cancer. But first he wanted to go downstairs to get a photograph of his wife. So Goodwin – president of Final Exit Network, one of the US’s most prominent assisted suicide groups – waited in the bedroom for his return.
Instead, Goodwin was surprised by agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), who burst in and arrested him on Wednesday for violating the state’s assisted suicide law. They also opened a new front in a resurgent war over Americans’ rights to take their own lives.
While other right-to-die activists nationwide have been fighting for – and in some key cases recently, winning – the legal right to assisted suicide, volunteers from Goodwin’s five-year-old non-profit organisation have focused on quietly visiting the bedsides of Americans and offering suicide instructions, which they prefer to call “guidance to self-deliverance”.
Using a system that incorporates a plastic hood and helium tanks available at many party supply shops, the group has helped about 200 people living in pain end their lives peacefully, according to Derek Humphry, chair of the group’s advisory board.
The Georgia sting operation, in which an agent posed as a cancer victim, comes a decade after the homicide conviction of Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan doctor and well-known assisted-suicide advocate who administered a lethal injection to a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1998.
Kevorkian’s subsequent eight-year prison stint lowered the national profile of what had been a white-hot ethical and legal debate.
But the issue has begun heating up again. In November voters in Washington made their state the second in the nation, after Oregon, to legalise physician-assisted suicides.
A month later, a judge in Montana ruled to allow the practice, as well; the state is appealing the decision. A legalisation Bill was introduced in the Hawaii legislature this year, but it will not get a hearing. Similar Bills are pending in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New Mexico.
In many places, however, assisting in a suicide remains a criminal act – in Georgia, it is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
Today, opponents of assisted suicide are hailing the arrest of Goodwin – along with three other members of the group who were also charged – as a much-needed victory for the status quo.
But some proponents also welcome the arrests, saying they hope the ensuing legal fight will help tear down remaining anti-suicide statutes.
"We will fight this all the way to the supreme court," said Humphry, the author of Final Exit, a best-selling suicide manual from which the group took its name. "This could be the seminal case on which the law turns. And we take encouragement from the fact that three states have already got it. So why shouldn't the rest of America have it?"
John Bankhead, a GBI spokesman, said the sting operation helped investigators verify the methods used by the Final Exit group. Technically, however, the criminal charges stem from the June 19th, 2008, suicide of John Celmer, a 58-year-old cancer patient from Cumming, Georgia.
According to an affidavit filed by investigators, Celmer was “cancer free at the time of his death,” although he was embarrassed and concerned about his appearance after surgeries for head and neck cancer. He also suffered from arthritis pain.
The Final Exit website clearly outlines the criteria for those who want the group’s volunteers to help them. One of them states: “You must have an incurable condition which causes intolerable suffering.” The affidavit outlines the detailed process the group uses to determine whether someone is eligible for house calls from the group’s “exit guides”.
It also outlines the group’s alleged involvement in Celmer’s death. Celmer apparently wrote to the group in May, saying he wanted to die using the helium method. In the letter, he said he would “pathetically” take “measures into my own hands” if they didn’t come to his aid. In compliance with one of the group’s rules, he also wrote a summary of his medical history and included some medical records, which investigators said was forwarded to Lawrence Egbert (81), a Baltimore doctor and the group’s medical director.
After Celmer’s death, his wife found one of the letters, as well as “release forms” he had signed for the group. Celmer’s family called authorities, and in a subsequent taped phone call with Celmer’s son, Final Exit member Claire Blehr (76), of Atlanta, said that she and Goodwin, the president of the Atlanta-area group, were with Celmer when he died. In another call Goodwin explained the helium method in detail, and that they held Celmer’s hands during the 12-minute helium inhalation process.
“This would have prevented John Celmer the ability to pull the hood off his head if he changed his mind about dying,” the affidavit claims.
Blehr and Egbert, a visiting assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, have also been arrested.
All are charged with assisted suicide, tampering with evidence, and violation of Georgia’s racketeering and corrupt influences act. If convicted on all counts, each faces 18 years or more in prison.
Humphry said Final Exit has about 100 volunteers around the country who have been trained by Egbert to serve as exit guides.
Humphry, who briefly worked as a Los Angeles Times reporter in the late 1970s, said the exit guides were well trained to know when they were crossing the legal line in each state.
He said they do not buy the materials needed for the job, nor do they touch them, or switch any buttons on.
“It’s not a crime in America to be in the presence of a suicide,” he said.
– ( LA Times-Washington Post)