It happens to be Pennsylvania news but the issue is one that could happen almost anywhere and that is certainly worth thinking about. A loving daughter helps her father to relieve his pain and is unjustly prosecuted for assisted suicide.

The terminally ill father in extreme pain drinks his legally prescribed morphine and slips in unconsciousness. One would think the next step might be a peaceful death. Certainly not a happy ending but perhaps the best ending under the circumstances.

But that was not to be. A hospice nurse arrived and called the police. Had they not intervened to revive him despite his do-not-resuscitate order and the expressed desire of his health care proxy (the same daughter), the terminally ill man could have had a peaceful death.

Instead he lived several more days before dying and Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane prosecuted the daughter for assisted suicide.

A week ago the case was dismissed. Here is a link to an article about the dismissal and the quote below is from that article.

A Schuylkill County judge on Tuesday dismissed the assisted-suicide charge against Barbara Mancini, the 58-year-old Philadelphia nurse who was arrested last February after handing her 93-year-old terminally ill father a bottle of morphine.

“A jury may not receive a case where it must rely on conjecture to reach a verdict,” Judge Jacqueline Russell said at the end of her 47-page opinion.

The case “would not warrant submission to a jury due to the lack of competent evidence,” she continued, adding that “the commonwealth’s reliance on speculation” served “as an inappropriate means to prove its case.”

The dismissal comes more than a year after Mancini’s Feb. 7 arrest.

Thus the case ends but the damage persists. Barbara Mancini has lost her job and incurred huge legal bills. And has gone through a very difficult year. She not only lost her father under circumstance made more difficult by state intervention but she faced years in prison as a result of that intervention.