An Oregon man has been arrested after he murdered his wife by shooting her in the head as "an act of love" because she was suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act is the only law in the nation that allows patients who appear to be terminally ill to end their lives. Virginia Roberts didn’t qualify, however, because, under the law, doctors must determine that the patient is within six months of death. Her family said she had asked her husband, John, to kill her.
“I am betting that Mr. Roberts will do little, if any, jail time for shooting his wife," Wesley J. Smith, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, writes on his blog. "This is the tide unleashed when we agree in law that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering.”
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