Word: exitement
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...whether they would benefit from having more resources, like home-care aides, at their disposal. The debate is an emotional one, says Paul Wolpe, director of the Atlanta-based Emory Center for Ethics, mainly because Americans are still uneasy with the idea of assisted suicide. Yet Jerry Dincin, Final Exit's vice president, believes the sentiment could be changing and that the right to die could become "the human right of the 21st century...
...Washington State and Montana voted late last year to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Oregon has had a physician-assisted suicide law since 1994, and New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New Mexico are considering whether to pass similar laws. In Georgia, however, assisted suicide is a felony, and members of Final Exit could face up to five years in prison if convicted of that charge. They also face three years for evidence-tampering and 20 years for racketeering...
Convicting Final Exit could be difficult. Prosecutors will have to prove just how involved the group was beyond providing information about suicide and holding a dying person's hand. "If the equipment was purchased by the dying person and the only thing the group did was provide a manual on how to do it, that seems very minimal and like it might fall outside the scope of [the law]," says Ani Satz, a law professor at Emory University...
...that they don't push a switch or administer a shot doesn't protect them from liability," says Russell Korobkin, a law professor at UCLA. "But I think it will be problematic to prosecute them for providing information, which is entitled to First Amendment protections. It seems that [Final Exit] is being very careful to stay on the right side of the line on this...
Dincin of Final Exit couldn't agree more, but the issue for him isn't about getting away with murder. "We realize the risk we take when we're willing to walk that fine line between what a jurisdiction might call assisted suicide and what we might call compassionate presence," he says. "But whose life is it anyway? I know that my life is mine. It doesn't belong to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation or any religious entity or any person. It belongs to me, and I have the right in extreme circumstances to take...