The Sarco pod at the location where it was allegedly used by a 64-year-old American woman who "died using the Sarco device". Photo / AFP
The Sarco pod at the location where it was allegedly used by a 64-year-old American woman who "died using the Sarco device". Photo / AFP
Warning: This story discusses suicide.
The Sarco suicide pod was used for the first time this week in Switzerland prompting headlines around the world and arrests from Swiss police.
The space-age-looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border.
The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country but assisted dying has been legal for decades.
The Last Resort organisation earlier revealed details of the device, telling a press conference in July that the person wishing to die must first pass a psychiatric assessment of their mental capacity - a key legal requirement.
The person climbs into the purple capsule, closes the lid, and is asked automated questions such as who they are, where they are and if they know what happens when they press the button.
“‘If you want to die’, the voice says in the processor, ‘Press this button’,” said Sarco inventor Philip Nitschke, a leading global figure in right-to-die activism.
He explained that once the button is pressed, the amount of oxygen in the air plummets from 21% to 0.05% in less than 30 seconds.
“Within two breaths of air of that low level of oxygen, they will start to feel disorientated, uncoordinated and slightly euphoric before losing consciousness,” Nitschke said.
“They will then stay in that state of unconsciousness for... around about five minutes before death will take place,” he added.
Dr Philip Nitschke
The Sarco monitors the oxygen level in the capsule, the person’s heart rate and the oxygen saturation of the blood.
“We will be able to see quite quickly when that person has died,” said Nitschke.
As for someone changing their mind at the very last minute, Nitschke said: “Once you press that button, there’s no way of going back.”
Police take action
A Swiss prosecutor said Thursday he had requested one person be remanded in custody after a 64-year-old US woman took her life inside a controversial suicide capsule in Switzerland this week.
Police in the northern Schaffhausen canton said on Tuesday that several people had been taken into custody and were facing criminal proceedings.
Peter Sticher, Schaffhausen’s public prosecutor, confirmed to AFP on Thursday that he had requested the preventative detention of one of those arrested.
A court will need to rule on the issue within 48 hours, Switzerland’s Keystone-ATS news agency reported.
Without divulging the identities or total number of people arrested Monday, the prosecutor confirmed that the others had been released from custody.
The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant said one of its photographers had been arrested on site.
The others arrested were reportedly two lawyers and Florian Willet, the co-president of The Last Resort assisted dying organisation.
The public prosecutor’s office had been informed by a law firm on Monday that an assisted suicide had taken place at a forest hut in Merishausen.
Along with police and emergency workers, prosecutors had gone “to the crime scene” and had discovered the “capsule with the lifeless person inside”, Sticher said Tuesday.
He told the Blick newspaper that the operators had been warned in writing ahead of time that “if they came to Schaffhausen and used Sarco, they would face criminal consequences”.
Swiss law generally allows assisted suicide if the person commits the lethal act themselves.
But on the same day the Sarco was used, Switzerland’s Interior Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider told lawmakers that the capsule was “not legal”.
“Firstly, it does not meet the requirements of product safety law and therefore cannot be placed on the market,” she said, adding that the use of nitrogen was also “not compatible with the purpose article of the Chemicals Act”.
