PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS Editorial: …Yourshaw was a 93-year-old man who was lingering in the hopeless state of death’s prelude – in end-stage diabetes, his heart and kidneys failing, arthritis compounding his horrible pain. He was in home-hospice care in Pottsville, Schuylkill County, and one day in February he asked his daughter to hand him his bottle of morphine.
What happened next is almost unthinkable. The hospice nurse reported the daughter. And Barbara Mancini, 57, a nurse who lives in Philadelphia, was arrested. A court has upheld the charge against her of aiding a suicide, a second-degree felony that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison…
The state attorney general is pursuing the case despite the offices’s prerogative of discretion. Kathleen Kane recently exercised that discretion by refusing to defend the state ban on gay marriage in court. The office apparently believes there’s a difference between defending a law and enforcing it, with this rationale: The case was handed up to the office because the local D.A. had a conflict, there’s sufficient evidence that a statute has been violated, so charges must be brought… (more)
