ST. PAUL, MN, March 21, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A former nurse from Minnesota has been spared nearly a year in prison after the state Supreme Court overturned his conviction for assisted suicide, ruling that encouraging vulnerable online contacts to kill themselves while he watched via webcam was not the same thing as helping them to do it.
William Melchert-Dinkel, 51, was convicted in 2011 of aiding in the suicides of a British man and a Canadian teenage girl – 32-year-old Mark Dryborough from Coventry, and 18-year-old Nadia Kajouji from Ontario. Melchert-Dinkel came into contact with both victims in online suicide chat rooms, where he used three different false identities to convince his fellow users that he was a depressed young woman who wanted to die.
According to court documents, Melchert-Dinkel confessed to making false suicide pacts with at least ten chat room contacts, including Dryborough and Kajouji. Often, he would arrange with his victim to meet online via webcam at a preset time, at which time they planned to commit suicide together. But when the time came to do the deed, Melchert-Dinkel would fake webcam problems, while assuring his victims that he was still going to honor the pact, and encouraging them to do the same. He told police he successfully convinced five people to take their lives, often giving detailed suggestions and instructions on how to do it.
The married father of two teenage daughters said he did it for “the thrill of the chase.”
Minnesota law prohibits assisted suicide, which according to the statute includes “advising” and/or “encouraging” suicide. But the Minnesota Supreme Court ruling Wednesday agreed with Melchert-Dinkel’s attorney that the provision prohibiting advisement or encouragement toward suicide is a violation of the first amendment right to free speech, effectively striking down that portion of the law.
“We did not dispute the facts of the case, but our argument was always that what Mr. Melchert-Dinkel did was protected as free speech and that he did not assist the acts of suicide,” said Mechert-Dinkel’s lawyer, Terry Watkins. “We are not condoning his actions and there is no attempt to suggest that anything he did is anything but salacious, immoral or depraved, but we believe … it was protected by the first amendment of the Constitution.”
Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition takes a different view. In an interview with LifeSiteNews, Schadenberg said that while free speech is a protected right, speech that incites damaging action has often been considered an exception to that rule.
“If I encourage you to rob a bank, for example, it’s considered by all the states in the U.S. to be a crime if you then go out and rob a bank,” Schadenberg said. “What Melchert-Dinkel and others are doing is communicating suicide through the internet. So it’s not just free speech alone; it is speech for a purpose, the purpose of helping to kill somebody.”
Schadenberg pointed to the dozens of cyber-bullying cases in the news, which have prompted some states to pass legislation outlawing such speech online, including Minnesota, which specifically includes online communication in its anti-harassment laws. He also pointed out that anti-libel laws limit speech for the same reason – preventing people from ruining another person’s life with their words.
“If the court were consistent, it would say that there is no crime of cyber-bullying,” Schadenberg said, “because it’s simply a communication of information, and information is free speech. But there’s a limit to our free speech, that limit being that I can’t use my speech to actually harm someone.”
“The judges [said] that this is a heinous act, but it’s not an illegal act,” said Schadenberg. “Well, that’s like saying that cyberbullying to the extreme where someone commits suicide … is not an illegal act, and we’re recognizing in the culture today that it is an illegal act.”
Melchert-Dinkel’s case has been returned to a lower court. County prosecutors must now decide whether to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, or try Melchert-Dinkel again on a different charge.