Assisted Dying Bill

New CPS guidelines could lead to rise in assisted suicides in UK, admits Keir Starmer

By Christopher Hope and Kate Devlin

Mr Starmer on Wednesday published a list of factors which will help lawyers to decide whether to charge people for assisting suicide.

The dying are not so easily categorised

From: Times online

A deathly cabal threatens the sanctity of life

Assisted Dying Bill | News Items | Submitted on 20/09/2009

From: Daily Telegraph

Assisted suicide could be excuse to kill burdensome elderly, says police chief

Assisted Dying Bill | News Items | Submitted on 27/08/2009

From: Daily Telegraph

Guidelines on assisted suicide law will be published this week by Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, to clarify when people were likely to be prosecuted.

Hospital doctor 'hastened the death of elderly patient' with painkillers

Assisted Dying Bill | News Items | Submitted on 06/07/2009

From: Telegraph

Baroness Campbell's speech on Lord Falconer

Assisted Dying Bill | News Items | Submitted on 06/07/2009

Here Come the Assisted Suicide Bills

Assisted Dying Bill | News Items | Submitted on 03/02/2009

Second Hand Smoke

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Assisted suicide law will apply to deaths in Britain and abroad

Assisted Dying Bill | News Items | Submitted on 03/08/2008

From: Telegraph

Keir Starmer, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service, is to clarify whether people should be prosecuted for aiding a suicide following a landmark ruling by the Law Lords last week. It had been assumed that this guidance would affect only cases in which friends or relatives helped people to die abroad, such as at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich.

Supprting the Murderer of a Disabled Girl

Assisted Dying Bill | News Items | Submitted on 28/01/2008

The most robust opponents of assisted suicide--and the most effective in my view--are disability rights advocates. They understand well that legalizing assisted suicide is a gun aimed at their hearts. An opinion column by one Ian Mulgrew of the Vancouver Sun underscores the threat. He urges that the child murderer Robert Latimer be freed. Latimer killed his daughter Traci, because she had cerebral palsy. From the column:

Born with a severe form of cerebral palsy, his daughter Tracy was a 12-year-old who weighed barely 40 pounds, had no mobility, suffered unrelenting pain and endured five to six epileptic seizures a day. She had little more than a newborn's consciousness. Doctors at the time of her death were preparing to install a permanent feeding tube in her stomach and to remove her thigh-bone to relieve the pressure on her hip, dislocated because of the metal rods already implanted in her spine to correct the damage done by her bedridden condition...

Dad, mom fight over starving brain-damaged daughter

Assisted Dying Bill | News Items | Submitted on 02/01/2008

A Delaware father is fighting his ex-wife, the medical establishment and the court system for the life of his 23-year-old daughter, left brain-damaged by a 2006 drug overdose, in a case with striking parallels to the 2005 death of Terri Schiavo in Florida.

"She's committed no crime and doesn't deserve to have this death imposed on her," Randy Richardson told the Wilmington, Del., News Journal of his daughter, Lauren Marie Richardson.

She was injured by a drug overdose in 2006 and has never recovered fully from the brain damage she suffered, he said. Court records reveal she was pregnant at the time and was kept on feeding tubes and a breathing machine in Christiana Hospital until her baby girl was born in February 2007.She's no longer in need of the breathing machine, and now a court order has been issued, and appealed, that could allow the removal of her feeding tube, and her resulting death, the newspaper reported.