Final Exit Network, those suicide pushers and “counselors,” have been convicted of assisting a suicide and interfering with a death scene in Minnesota. Good. From the AP story:

Final Exit Network was charged in the death of Doreen Dunn, 57, of Apple Valley, who had been living with intense pain for more than a decade after she had a bad reaction to a medical procedure.

According to trial testimony, Dunn’s husband arrived home on May 30, 2007, to find his wife dead on the couch. The family and medical examiner initially thought she died from natural causes.

But information uncovered during a 2009 investigation in Georgia revealed that Dunn had joined Final Exit Network and that two other members — Jerry Dincin and Dr. Larry Egbert, the group’s former medical director — were with her the day she died. Equipment she used to take her life by helium asphyxiation, the group’s preferred method of suicide, had been removed from the scene.

The punishment, alas, will not nearly fit the crime — helping to make a woman dead and covering up the death’s cause:

The group faces a maximum fine of $33,000.

Here’s a question to ponder: Helping someone commit suicide by helium — FEN’s favorite approach — is a crime. But we should let doctors do the same thing with barbiturates?

Suicide isn’t a medical treatment, and a lethal prescription is no more “medication” than a helium canister.

Image by P903i (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.