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SUICIDE

Charges filed after psychiatric patient’s heroin death

Manslaughter charges have been filed against a 34-year-old man from Borås who helped a woman commit suicide by giving her an overdose of heroin.

The man and the woman had got to know each other in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. Both were there voluntarily and the woman was free to move about the facility.

The 34-year-old had been discharged shortly before the incident.

Then one afternoon in August, both were discovered in a hospital bathroom. The woman was dead and the 34-year-old was suffering from severe fatigue.

According to the indictment, the man helped the woman obtain heroin. She had driven to Gothenburg and picked up the drug on the same day she died.

“She intended to take her life. He assisted, which makes him an accomplice to an intentional death,” said prosecutor Urban Svenkvist to the Borås Tidning newspaper.

The prosecutor refers to the conviction of debater Berit Hedeby, who advocated for assisted suicide and in 1977 helped a gravely ill man take his own life, resulting in a one-year prison sentence.

The 34-year-old claims the death was an accident.

The hospital has reported the incident to health authorities in according with Sweden’s Lex Maria medical laws.

Staff had questioned whether it was appropriate for the woman to have contact with the 34-year-old, but the ward had no other places left in which to put her.

SUICIDE

Switzerland backs assisted suicide in prisons

Sick prisoners will be allowed to request assisted suicide in Switzerland although the modalities still have to be worked out, prison system officials said on Thursday.

Switzerland backs assisted suicide in prisons
Illustration photo: AFP

The issue has come to the fore following a request made in 2018 by a convict behind bars for life, which exposed a legal vacuum in a country that has long been at the forefront of the global right-to-die debate.

Switzerland's cantons, which implement prison sentences, have agreed “on the principle that assisted suicide should be possible inside prisons,” the Conference of Cantonal Departments of Justice and Police said.

Conference director Roger Schneeberger told AFP that there were still differences between cantons on how assisted suicides could be carried out in prisons and a group of experts would issue recommendations by November.

Swiss law generally allows assisted suicide if the person commits the lethal act themselves — meaning doctors cannot administer deadly injections, for example — and the person consistently and independently articulates a wish to die.

Organisations that support assisted suicide also apply their own procedures, which are more robust than the legal requirements and sometimes require the person who is requesting it to have a serious illness.

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