Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Assisted suicide defense to "cover up" alleged murder.

Alex Schadenberg
By Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

A Brockville nurse who has been accused of killing her terminally ill husband could have been "covered up" if assisted suicide was legal.

The trial of Nancy Lane in the alleged murder of her husband Art Lane began yesterday in Ottawa. Nancy, a nurse and a former member of the Brockville town council, allegedly intentionally overdosed her husband, after returning from the Dominican Republic, where she was visiting her alleged lover. She is accused of killing her husband in order to collect his life insurance.

Art Lane
The Ottawa Sun reported Crown prosecutor Robert Morrison as stating:

By 2008 she had taken a lover half her age in the Dominican Republic. 
She was besotted with him, writing to one friend on the eve of a visit that "in a few days I will be in heaven." 
A forensic accountant will testify that the Lane finances had reached "complete desperation" in 2009 and "financial armageddon" in the months before Art Lane's death, 
Art Lane had a $200,000 life insurance plan and she was the sole beneficiary. What's more, if he went into the light she would be able to collect on his pension. 
On Oct. 6, 2009 she returned from the Dominican. Art Lane picked her up in Montreal.
Two days later his son looked in and found him frail and failing, drinking water from a backyard pool. 
Art Lane had grown unresponsive. He was drenched in sweat and barely breathing. 
She didn't call 911. She did laundry, 
When she was done, she returned upstairs and found her husband dead. She grabbed a stethoscope to make sure and still didn't call 911. 
She then burned pill bottles,  
Lane said her dead husband was a palliative care patient, whose death was expected. 
But after she learned an autopsy would take place she claimed it was suicide. 
Toxicologists would find traces of drugs in his system that could have reduced his heart rate and blood pressure. 
The pills were water soluble too, making it easy for her -- a Brockville mental hospital nurse -- to slip them into his water, the court heard.
According to the Ottawa Citizen, Lane's son acted as an undercover agent to collect evidence for the police. The Ottawa Citizen also reported that Nancy Lane's defence is to plead guilty to the lesser charge of assisted suicide. The Ottawa Citizen reported that:
Lane has presented her husband’s death as a mercy killing. 
that he was depressed and suicidal and that his wife assisted his suicide with a bunch of pills.
In Oregon, where assisted suicide is legal, this alleged murder would, more easily, be "covered up" as an assisted suicide. In Oregon, there is no oversight once the lethal dose is obtained. 

If assisted suicide were legal, Nancy Lane's claim that this was an assisted suicide, would likely result in minor charges, at worst, for not fulfilling the rules of the law.

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