Killing: A New "Human Right?"

Here we go again- amazing how every activist wants their cause to be a “human right.” Pathetic.

Assisted suicide: The last frontier of civil rights?

 In a nation influenced, but not dictated, by religious doctrine, assisted suicide generally remains a criminal act that can implicate anyone in the room.

In California, it’s a crime to support suicide in any way. That’s been the law for more than a century.

But prosecutions are rare and sensational. If you think otherwise, you don’t know Jack — Jack Kevorkian.

In the main, a jury’s sympathy for assisted suicide trumps the unforgiving letter of the law.

Prosecutors know from experience that jurors put themselves, or their loved ones, into the painful position of a person who for rational reasons wants out of this mortal coil.

There’s no courtroom in the country, for example, that would have found Alan Purdy, 88, guilty of a felony for tearfully witnessing the suicide of Jo, his 84-year-old wife who suffered crippling pain from a variety of ailments.

In a sense, it would have been a crime against nature not to stand by her as she ate the sedative-laced apple sauce and placed a plastic bag over her head.

And yet Alan, a retired biomedical engineer, was immediately presumed by investigators to be a criminal suspect. more