Is Helping a Man Kill Himself the Same as Murder?

[meegbear]

Jeffrey Locker was a motivational speaker. He was good enough to motivate a random guy that he met on the street, Kenneth Minor, to take his ATM card in exchange for holding a knife as Locker repeatedly impaled himself on it, and died.

The basic facts of the case are not in dispute. And yesterday, based upon those facts, Minor was convicted of second degree murder. Because he used the victim's ATM card to take out money— something Minor says Locker agreed to—the prosecutor charged him with murdering Locker, for money. But is it murder if the victim begs you to do it? The judge in the case said that "The consent of the victim is not a defense to murder." Minor's lawyer disagreed:

Mr. Gotlin said the New York law on assisted suicide made no distinction between passive or active participation; it only states that a person "causes or aides" in another person's death. (In that case, he said the charge would be manslaughter in the second degree and not murder.)

It's a philosophical question. Clearly, society does not want to encourage suicidal people to hire strangers off the street to help them die violently. But if you believe in the right of a person to decide to end his own life, then failing to distinguish those who assist them with suicide from common, cold-blooded murderers is lunacy, not justice.

http://gawker.com/#!5776462/is-helping-a-man-kill-himself-the-same-as-murder

I don't know what to think ....

[HopeHoops]

1. It depends on the situation. If the suicidal individual is of sound mind, then no, it is not murder

If the suicidal individual is of questionable mind, then perhaps it could be classified as at least accessory to murder, but not murder.

Frankly, I think nearly all individuals who consider seeking assisted suicide because of medical conditions have given it ample consideration and are fully capable of making rational decisions to terminate their own lives.

[david13]

2. You may well be looking at a factual question here, not a philosophical

one.
What evidence of this 'suicide' is there? Is the truth a street robbers excuse?
dc

[guruoo]

3. Depends upon the helper's motives. nt

[elias49]

4. My Dad wanted me to help him die

when he was in the end stages of his life. His was in a VA hospital suffering from symptoms of ALS. He called me one night at dinner time, asking me to come get him discharged and take him back to his home so that he could try to gas himself dead at the door of his gas oven. I couldn't do it. I couldn't finish dinner either and had to leave my wife and two young kids at the dinner table to finish alone.
That was a bad day.

[Brickbat]

5. I am sorry that happened to you.

[Brickbat]

6. There is a huge difference between a terminally ill person making a sound decision to have someone

help her hook up to a life-ending dose of morphine, and someone stopping someone on the street and asking them to hold a knife while they impale themselves on it. If I take this case at face value, I have a lot of sympathy for Kenneth Minor. What a selfish, exploitive, disgusting thing for Locker to do.

If Kenneth Minor were a fellow author, white, well-spoken, and with a home, what would the outcome be?

[lapislzi]

7. Then there's the phenom of "suicide by cop"

I think we're all acquainted with the phrase. A desperate individual with nothing to lose commits some heinous act and provokes the police into shooting him/her. Police (very broadly speaking) acting in self-defense (desperate crook lunging at them, pulling a gun, whatever).

You don't hear about cops being charged with anything in these instances.

?? Just throwing it out there.

[PoliticAverse]

8. The lesson? If someone ask you to help them commit insurance fraud say no.

http://www.dnainfo.com/20110303/harlem/guilty-verdict-assisted-suicide-murder-trial

[treestar]

9. Yes.

Maybe people have a "right" to decide but if they are suffering from depression it's not quite the same thing. Person needs treatment, not "assistance."