No Assisted Suicide Charge for Son of Sir Edward Downes
BBC News (March 19, 2010)
My very first post for the Death Reference Desk occurred on July 15, 2009 and it discussed the deaths of Edward and Joan Downes. The Downes’ went to the Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland to die together, their’s is a common story in the UK. Indeed, the stories about UK residents going to the Dignitas clinic remain an almost weekly occurrence.
What is new about the Downes’ case is that the Director of Public Prosecutions in the UK (Keir Starmer) has decided to not charge either of the Downes’ children with assisting their parents to die. I have discussed at length how suicide in the UK is legal but assisting a person to die is not. The Death Ref section on the Death + The Law presents these cases. Today’s legal decision is also important because it is the first time that the new guidelines drawn up by Keir Starmer have found no public interest in prosecuting a family member who clearly acted on compassionate grounds.
I am including a news clip from last July about Joan and Edward Downes. It’s interesting to note what has and hasn’t changed since then.
- By: John
- In: Death + the Law| Death Ethics
- Tags: assisted dying, assisted suicide, Edward and Joan Downes
Coffin Academy… Now with Video!
18 Mar2010
R.I.P. Me
Nightline (March 10, 2010)via KoreAm, “Coffin Academy on Nightline”
I posted in January about Coffin Academy, the corporate retreat for confronting one’s own death in South Korea. Clarissa Ward, reporter for Nightline, recently checked it out. Enjoy.
- By: Meg Holle
- In: Death + Popular Culture
- Tags: death meditation, seminars, video
The Sisters Fox
16 Mar2010
Episode 27: The Sisters Fox
Nate DiMeo, The Memory Palace (March 12, 2010)
In his latest podcast at The Memory Palace, Nate DiMeo tells the story of the Fox Sisters in mid-nineteenth century America. These girls spooked their parents and neighbors with tales of communing with the dead. Naturally, this turned into a sell-out show in New York City, where the teenager sisters wowed the rich and famous with their necromantic talents.
While there were plenty of skeptics, believers abounded. Why? Says DiMeo:
They wanted to believe. This was the 1850s — people just died all the time from diseases, minor flu and infections. Things that don’t kill us now. Their family members, their friends, their kids would die in childbirth, in accidents at work and at home, why wouldn’t they want to believe they weren’t gone? That those they lost could be found.
Soon people were holding séances like we hold dinner parties. They were putting their faith in tarot readers and mystics. Some were just scam artists, others were just wrong. They were just seeing things that weren’t there. But all of them together were changing America, in the way its people thought about death and life. And this modern spiritualism… stayed at the center of American life for decades to come.
- By: Meg Holle
- In: Afterlife| Death + Popular Culture
- Tags: podcast, spiritualism
Crowd-sourcing Genealogy at Find a Grave
15 Mar2010
Tracking Down Relatives, Visiting Graves Virtually
Lauren Silverman, NPR (March 15, 2010)
NPR has a nice short piece on Find A Grave, a one-man operation founded in 1995 fueled by an interest in famous persons’ graves that has become a full-on crowd-sourced enterprise for finding anybody’s headstone worldwide, famous or not. People can request photos of graves in faraway places and volunteers in the area will hunt it down, snap a shot and upload it to the site.
Lauren Silverman goes to Arlington National Cemetery with one such volunteer, Anne Cady, on behalf of Teddi Smith in Florida, who is looking for her cousin Jesse Veitch, a WWI veteran.
“There’s actually an emotional attachment that you get when you actually see the picture of the grave marker,” Smith says. “You can put that in your family tree, and they are no longer just a name and some dates.”
- By: Meg Holle
- In: Cemeteries| Death + the Web
- Tags: genealogy, headstones
2009 Oregon Death with Dignity Numbers
14 Mar2010
2009 Summary of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act
The Oregon Public Health Division (March 2010)Report Finds 36 Died Under Assisted Suicide Law
William Yardley, The New York Times (March 04, 2010)
Earlier this month, the state of Oregon published its annual report on who used the 1997 Death with Dignity Act. I have discussed the ins and outs of the Oregon law before but I want to highlight the following sections of the 2009 report:
• As in prior years, most participants were between 55 and 84 years of age (78.0%), white (98.3%), well-educated (48.3% had at least a baccalaureate degree), and had cancer (79.7%). Patients who died in 2009 were slightly older (median age 76 years) than in previous years (median age 70 years).
• Most patients died at home (98.3%); and most were enrolled in hospice care (91.5%) at time of death.
• In 2009, 98.7% of patients had some form of health care insurance. Compared to previous years, the number of patients who had private insurance (84.7%) was much greater than in previous years (66.8%), and the number of patients who had only Medicare or Medicaid insurance was much less (13.6% compared to 32.0%).
What is really important to note about the individuals using the Oregon law is their age, ethnicity, access to hospice care, and health insurance status. In a nutshell, the vast majority of the individuals were in the middle to upper middle social classes and hardly the lowest rung of Oregonians. This is important to point out because it demonstrates that this particular Assisted Dying law is not killing off the weak, the poor, and the uneducated.
In short, the law is not being abused.
- By: John
- In: Death + the Law| Death Ethics
- Tags: assisted dying, assisted suicide, bioethics