A Pennsylvania woman has been charged with assisting her terminally ill and suffering 93-year-old father to commit suicide by providing him, at his request, with a large quantity of his prescribed medication. He took the medicine and died four days later. A Pennsylvania statute calls for serious prison time and fines for assisting suicide. New Jersey’s similar statute, N.J.S.A. 2C:11-6, provides: “A person who purposely aids another to commit suicide is guilty of a crime of the second degree if his conduct causes such suicide or an attempted suicide, and otherwise of a crime of the fourth degree.”
In large measure, such statutes are honored in the breach, in that violations are often unreported, or they result in greatly reduced penalties where the defendant is a family member responding to the plea of a suffering terminally ill loved one.
