Infection kills right-to-die campaigner

CANBERRA - Australia's right-to-die debate has been given new focus by the death yesterday of Perth quadriplegic Christian Rossiter, who last month won the legal right to starve to death in a nursing home.

Rossiter, 49, a former stockbroker, was immobilised by a series of accidents and was able to speak only through an artificial voicebox, could move only one finger sufficiently to press a call button, and spent his waking hours staring at television while being fed through a tube into his stomach.

In a statement to the Supreme Court of Western Australia, Rossiter said he wanted to die.

"I am a prisoner in my own body. I can't move. I can't even wipe the tears from my eyes," he told the court.

Rossiter died early yesterday morning of a respiratory infection, giving new impetus to the right-to-die movement despite assertions by both the court and his lawyer, John Hammond, that the decision to grant him his wish to die was not one of euthanasia.

Hammond told ABC radio that the ruling was instead about allowing people the right to refuse treatment if they were dying.

But the decision has been seen as a step towards the eventual legalisation of euthanasia, a controversial and emotional debate in Australia since the Northern Territory passed the world's first right-to-die legislation in 1996.

Four people were helped to die by euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke, using a machine to deliver a fatal dose of barbiturate, before the law was overturned by the federal Parliament in a conscience vote.

Unlike states, which have their own constitutions, laws in Australia's two territories can be overridden by Canberra.

Other developments have also been spurring the debate.

In Tasmania, where a nurse was given a suspended sentence for helping her ailing parents to die in 2005, a "dying with dignity" bill is at present being debated by a state parliamentary committee.

Last year, a New South Wales Supreme Court jury convicted two women of manslaughter after they imported and supplied Nembutal - a lethal form of phenobarbital used to kill animals - to 71-year-old Alzheimer's sufferer Graeme Wylie.

Wylie's partner, 60-year-old Shirley Justins, was sentenced to 22 months' periodic detention. Her friend Caren Jennings, suffering from breast cancer, used Nembutal to kill herself before she was sentenced.

Justins had argued that Wylie, a former airline pilot, had wanted to die.

But his application to die in Switzerland through the Dignitas Group had been rejected on the grounds that he had not been competent to make such a decision, a ruling also upheld in Justins' trial.

Justice Roderick Howie said in sentencing Justins that despite being regarded by some as a test case for euthanasia, it was instead a joint criminal enterprise to bring about Wylie's death.

"The law holds human life so sacred that it does not give permission for someone else to take it," he said.

However, the same court has since upheld the right of patients to refuse medical treatment provided they had made wills well in advance of falling ill, specifying directives on their care in the event of fatal illnesses.

The WA Supreme Court had made its earlier landmark decision following evidence from Rossiter and his carers in a case brought by the Brightwater Care Group, which runs the nursing home at which Rossiter had been living.

Rossiter had reportedly wanted to fly to Switzerland for an assisted death, but was baulked by the reluctance of others to breach the state's stringent laws on assisted suicide. Instead, he had asked Brightwater to stop feeding him through the tube inserted in his stomach.

The group had sought the court's ruling on its legal liabilities if it agreed to the request.

Hammond told ABC radio that the case had set an important precedent that was likely to lead to further, similar, actions.

"People will start saying more often to doctors and nursing staff, 'I now want to leave this world,"' he said.

"I think Christian will be remembered as someone who was very brave and took up a fight which will give a lot of people comfort ... [He] set a means where people could exit life with dignity, and that is something he was very keen to do."