NYT, pg1: For Role in Suicide, a Friend to the End Is Now Facing Jail

For Role in Suicide, a Friend to the End Is Now Facing Jail
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: March 4, 2005


CORNWALL, Conn. - It seems no one in this tiny town believes a crime was committed on the morning last June when Huntington Williams cleaned a revolver and advised his old friend John T. Welles where to aim.

Mr. Welles, 66, was dying of cancer and, according to a police report, wanted to make sure he killed himself with one clean shot.

When he told Mr. Williams he was considering firing the gun through his mouth, toward his spine, Mr. Williams, 74, suggested aiming a little higher, more toward the center of his skull, according to the report. Then, Mr. Williams told investigators later that day, he walked down the long driveway of Mr. Welles's remote and rambling old house and waited for his friend to pull the trigger....

***

More than seven months after Mr. Welles committed suicide, a state prosecutor charged Mr. Williams with second-degree manslaughter, citing what state police investigators said Mr. Williams had told them about Mr. Welles's last day and a state law that specifically addresses assisted suicide. The felony charge could bring 10 years in prison.

Mr. Welles, a colorful and beloved local figure who never married, never held a steady job and walked barefoot in the summer, talked openly and unemotionally about killing himself if he became incapacitated. Yet while his suicide may not have been surprising, the arrest of Mr. Williams stunned many people in Cornwall, population 1,434, a wooded cluster of villages in northwest Connecticut....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/nyregion/04suicide.html

Few cases like this go to trial. Most are tossed out by grand juries. The ones that do go to trial rarely result in any sort of conviction.

Most people are not wackjob right to lifers.

People also realize that a determined person can kill himself with half a glass of water. The decision was the suicide's alone.

What this man did is insure that someone determined to take their own life didn't end up a vegetable on life support for 20 years - which, based upon his statements in the article, was likely a component of why Mr. Welles took his life in the first place.

Convicting this man would be a crime, imho.

I think he had left and was walking down the front walk when he heard the gunshot.

I'll bet this doesn't even make it to court. Well, I hope it doesn't.