Prime-Time Injection

The Defendant, a physician, had spent years at the center of the assisted-suicide debate. In September 1998 he went further than ever before. A 52-year-old man in the grip of advanced ALS consented to die, and the Defendant did not merely supply a machine for the patient to trigger — he personally administered lethal injections of a sedative, a paralytic, and potassium chloride. He filmed the entire procedure and delivered the videotape to a national television news program, which broadcast it to a national audience. On camera the Defendant all but dared the state to prosecute him. It did. Charged with second-degree murder, he insisted that a compassionate mercy killing carried out at the patient's request was no crime at all.