Former Nurse Charged With Aiding Suicides Via Web

mernil writes "A former US nurse has been charged with two counts of aiding suicides on the Internet, US officials say. William Melchert-Dinkel, 47, is accused of encouraging the suicides of Mark Drybrough from Coventry, UK, in 2005 and Canada's Nadia Kajouji in 2008. Melchert-Dinkel, from Minnesota, allegedly posed as a female nurse, instructing people in suicide chatrooms how to take their lives. He reportedly admitted helping five or fewer people kill themselves. Some legal experts say it could be difficult to prosecute Melchert-Dinkel under a rarely used law because he allegedly only encouraged the victims to kill themselves, without physically helping them to take their lives."

Comments

Ok, so what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Killing yourself is, and should be, an individual's choice. Providing responsible and accurate on how to do it without causing oneself a lot of pain and suffering is a good deed, not a crime.

Re:Ok, so what?

[gmack]

Except that's not what happened, this guy pretended to be a woman, made fake suicide pacts and actually pressured people to go through with them.

Re:Ok, so what?

[Sponge Bath]

Yes, this guy is pretty sick. From the summary I thought this was about assisted suicide of the terminally ill. The article makes it clear it was encouragement of depressed, but physically healthy, people to commit suicide.

Re:Ok, so what?

[h00manist]

There is freedom of speech, as long as nobody listens. If too many people start listening to you and doing something based on your speech, all your freedoms - not just speech - will soon start being questioned and curtailed all over. Take a look at anyone saying something unpopular, whether right or wrong. In the case of speech encouraging violence, death, etc, if people listen, there will be quite a reaction. Don't ask me if it's right or wrong. I don't think it's that simple a question, with black and white answers for every case.

Re:Ok, so what?

[nbauman]

An individual choice has to be a rational, informed decision.

William Melchert-Dinkel was a nurse. He could identify and take advantage of vulnerable people, who were clinically depressed and unable to make rational, informed decisions. He tricked them into making irrational uninformed decisions.

It's as if you had a curable cancer and he told you, "I'm a nurse. Your cancer is incurable. You're going to die painfully. You'd be better off killing yourself now."

This is similar to the situation that doctors deal with every day in which a patient who is dying has to decide whether they want to stop treatment.

A patient has to be capable of making a rational decision. Some drugs and medical conditions make people depressed (independent of the normal depression that comes from dealing with the situation of an illness). Regularly, people decide during an illness that they don't want to live, change their mind after they get better, and are glad they didn't die.

Depression itself can be a clinical condition. People who are treated with drugs or talk therapy often get better, sometimes dramatically so. If a drug can make such a dramatic difference, that without the drug your individual choice is to die, and with the drug your individual choice is to live, that shows you how unreliable and irrational individual choice is.

I would reluctantly concede that people who don't want to live simply because the burden of life is too much, and who have been treated unsuccessfully for depression, physical pain, or any other cause, have a right to kill themselves. Quadriplegics have a legal right to refuse feeding. But that's only after they've exhausted every other option, which wasn't the case here.

We give people the right to make an individual choice to die, but not when they're obviously incapable of making a rational decision. Most of us want the government to interfere and stop us from killing ourselves when we're temporarily irrational.

Example of "help" provided

[monoi]

From here:

Kajouji: I am planning to attempt this Sunday.

Cami: Wow. You want to use hanging too?

Kajouji: I’m going to jump.

Cami: Well, that’s okay, but most people puss out before doing that. Plus, they don’t wanna leave a terribly messy mess for others to clean up.

Kajouji: I want it to look like an accident. There’s a bridge over the river where there’s a break in the ice. The water is really rough right now, and it should carry me back under the ice, so I can’t really come up for air. And if drowning doesn’t get me, hopefully the hypothermia will. Is there anything you want to do before you go? I’m trying to get my affairs in order—cleaning my room, paying off my loan.

Cami: I’ve got everything ready to go. My mom will get my insurance and money, so there will be no worries there. I’ve got my funeral s--- all taken care of. Got rope and stuff ready. Do you have a webcam?

Kajouji: Yes.

Cami: Well, if it comes down to hanging, I can help you with it with the cam. Proper positioning of the rope is important.

Kajouji: Thank you.

Cami: That method is so fast and certain, I can’t think of another way for me. I don’t want to feel nothing.

Words fail me, really.

Quite right

[Snaller]

Suicide should be a human right.

If society tries to ban that THEY MUST help the person in every way and totally support them their entire lives - and if they are not prepared to do that they should shut up and back off and not prevent people from ending their lives if that is what they feel they must.

Re:Quite right

[h00manist]

Suicide should be a human right.

From what I know, from a humanist philosophy point of view, any human being needs to have the right to full control of their body. So if someone wants to do something insane with their body, they are entitled to it. Encouraging mutilation or death however, would not be humanist. So if you decide you want to die, fine. If you want to preach people should want to die, need help to die, should be sold equipment, manuals, videos, books, have suicide parties, suicide lounges, suicide workshops, suicide encouragement boot camps, pro suicide marketing campaigns, etc, all of which is speech, well, that would be psychological violence. Thats ideals, philosophy, morality, etc however. The field of law is another matter, and how to word the law so it's not abused either way is not so easy.

Re:mob justice

[kramerd]

It's sad that people are being prosecuted for being dicks rather than for breaking actual laws. Mob justice acts with an arbitrary and inconsistent hand, and has no place under the rule of law.

He pretended to be a female nurse in order to instruct others on how to commit suicide.

To clarify, the issue is not that he pretended to be female, but rather that he pretended to be a nurse (although if anyone relied on him being a female for the purpose of committing suicide, it in fact could be an issue).

I'm fairly certain that fraud, especially in the context of pretending to have medical training, is in fact a crime based on actual laws.

Meanwhile, he has been charged with two counts of assisting suicide, not convicted by mob justice (for example, being hanged in a tree without a court hearing). He has a chance to prove that he did nothing wrong, or to be convicted of a crime that has been committed, specifically because of rule of law. Your implication that charging someone with a crime based on valid allegations (in this case, based on the fact that the accused admits to having helped people commit suicide) should be seen as mob justice is patently absurd.

Re:Hmm

[master0ne]

except that the person here isnt a "she" only pretending to be a female, and made suicide pacts with these "victims" to encourage them to do so. It could be argued that without this persons "advice" there people could very well be alive and happy. They were not terminally ill... there was no counseling to prove they were even clinically depressed... this person coerced these people into suicide for his own entertainment. I have a problem with someone doing something as deceitful and horrible as this.

Re:So now we can't tell some jerk to "drop dead"?

[Hognoxious]

Is there a legal concept of "speech intended to create immediate, injurious actions, bypassing people's rational cognitive function." ?

Yes. At the risk of being tautologous it's either "political campaigning" or "advertising".