Sunday, December 9, 2018

Patient-Directed Suicide Has Morphed into Family-Determined Suicide

To view original article, click here.

Recently the effort to legalize physician-assisted suicide has ramped up in Virginia. For 2,500 years, medicine has claimed the role of healer, but this dangerous public policy would change that by requiring a doctor’s participation in a patient’s demise .

Patients should never be conflicted about which role their physician plays.

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Legislative Panel Punts on Assisted Suicide-Euthanasia Proposal

Del. Scott Garrett, MD
To view the original article, click here.
A group of lawmakers shot down proposals to allow medical-aid-in-dying, also known as physician-assisted suicide [and euthanasia], in Virginia on Wednesday in a review of a series of legislative recommendations on health care.
Del. Kaye Kory, D-Fairfax, requested that the Joint Commission on Health Care study the medical-aid-in-dying debate, in which a patient with less than six months to live obtains lethal drugs through a physician to end his or her life.

Saturday, September 13, 2014

Man admits killing mother as part of an assisted suicide pact

http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140912/NEWS/140919922

MONTICELLO - Andrew Moore broke down in tears Thursday in Sullivan County Court as he pleaded guilty to fatally strangling his mother as part of an assisted suicide pact.

Moore will face a maximum sentence of five to 15 years behind bars in the plea bargain agreement. In return, he pleaded guilty to a second-degree manslaughter charge for assisting his mother, Margaret "Peggy" Regalia of Bloomingburg, in committing suicide in January.

Judge Frank LaBuda posed one last question before Moore was taken away in handcuffs.

"So, you strangled the last breath out of your mother with your hands?"

"Yes," Moore said as he began to cry.

Regalia was found dead in a house on Nashopa Road in Bloomingburg after her daughter Jennifer and Mike Panet, Jennifer's husband, asked police to check the house when the ShopRite in Montgomery, where Regalia worked, notified them she had missed two days of work.

District Attorney James Farrell said Moore and his mother had a "suicide agreement," to which Moore had confessed when he was initially arrested. Farrell said the investigation confirmed that.

Farrell said Moore, 29 when he strangled his mother, was "very troubled," but his remorse did not appear to be fake.

"The fact he has remorse is a good thing," Farrell said. "But he still has to held accountable for his actions and for taking her life. And he'll have to live with what he did for the rest of his days."

Moore is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 18.

abeam@th-record.com

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Ex-Navy sailor from Willits convicted in assisted suicide



Paul Stephen Bricker, 27, had pleaded guilty April 4 to voluntary manslaughter in the July 2009 death of Gerard Curran in Virginia Beach. Bricker, a petty officer second class at the time, testified that Curran said he was ill and asked him to help him commit suicide and make it appear to be a homicide so his family would receive Navy death benefits, the newspaper reported.

Curran, 45, who was having marital and alcohol-related problems, previously had attempted to stab himself in the chest, the Virginian-Pilot reported.

On the day of his death, he choked himself with a yellow physical therapy band. When he passed out, Bricker stabbed him in the chest.

Bricker was sentenced Monday to 10 years in prison, but the judge suspended five, according to the Virginian-Pilot.