Judge Drops Assisted Suicide Charges for Pa. Nurse Accused of Giving Dying Father Morphine
A judge ruled Wednesday to drop the assisted suicide charges against a Pennsylvania woman accused of handing her 93-year-old, terminally-ill father a bottle of morphine with the intention of ending his life.
Schuylkill County Judge Jacqueline L. Russell said in her 47-page opinion that the accusations against 57-year-old Barbara Mancini, a nurse, did not provide sufficient evidence to prove she helped in the death of her father.
The Pennsylvania attorney general's office accused Mancini of assisting her elderly father, Joseph Yourshaw, in ending his own life by handing him a nearly-full bottle of morphine at his home in Pottsville in February 2013. Yourshaw was admitted to a hospital after a hospice nurse dialed 911, and he died four days later.
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Russell wrote in her ruling that prosecutors failed to prove Mancini had given her father the drug, or that she ever had the intention of helping him end his life. Police had testified in a lower court ruling that Mancini gave repeated statements saying she gave her father the drug because he wanted to die, but Pennsylvania law states that one cannot be prosecuted for a crime if there is no additional evidence beyond statements they made to authorities. Mancini agreed that she had given her father the drug, but only to relieve pain, not with the intention of ending his life.
"The evidence does not indicate that Mr. Yourshaw's daughter had solicited, counseled, urged or convinced him to kill himself, nor does the evidence indicate that his daughter injected, administered or actively participated in Mr. Yourshaw's actual ingestion of the morphine," Russell wrote in her opinion, adding that the prosecution's argument was blemished with "little independent investigation, significant hearsay … speculation, guess."
"A jury may not receive a case where it must rely on conjecture to reach a verdict," the judge concluded in her opinion.
After over a year since her arrest on Feb. 7, 2013, Mancini released a statement Tuesday describing her excitement at the verdict. "I'm very relieved and elated that Judge Russell ruled the way she did," Mancini said, according to Philly.com. "It's a long opinion. She really took them to task."
Joe Peters, a spokesman for the attorney general, told Philly.com that his office had yet to receive a copy of Russell's ruling and therefore was waiting to comment. There are only five states where assisted suicide is legal: Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico.
