MG was found dead on May 21, 2019 at his home in Angers, he committed suicide by ingesting pentobarbital. The first signs of Charcot’s disease appeared in 2016 in this 60-year-old man who, since then, had tried several times to end his life, and whose entourage knew the will to end it before his incurable disease degenerates and prevents it.
He had obtained the lethal drug thanks to a veterinary friend who had written at his request – after initially refusing – false prescriptions. This had earned the veterinarian to appear for the first time before the Angers court in May 2022, not for “aiding suicide”, an offense that does not exist in French law, but for “false writing”, during a trial in which the he object obviously went beyond this trivial offence.
Could assisted suicide be tolerated in this particular case? The court had answered yes: the veterinarian had been released, on the grounds that the alleged facts had been “commanded by the state of necessity to cause the escape [M. G.] to the inescapable fate which was his, namely the death at a close deadline in sufferings of a particular intensity”.
The judgment proposed a broad interpretation of “state of necessity”, a legal concept which, in short, allows breaking the law if it results in avoiding damage that would have been greater if it had not been broken, and that the penal code (article 122-7) defines as follows: “A person is not criminally liable who, faced with a present or imminent danger which threatens himself, others or property, performs an act necessary to safeguard the person or property. » The inevitable decline and the suffering that MG was going to face before his death justified, according to the court, that the veterinarian committed an offence.
“Is there no place in law for the will of men? »
The prosecution had appealed this decision, and the thorny legal-philosophical debate on the end of life was back, Thursday, June 22, before the Angers Court of Appeal, where the veterinarian friend, 62, discreet and not very talkative, simply recalled that he had ” Never ” regretted his gesture, but that he was not an activist for the cause, just a man faced with a dilemma: let a friend suffer, or help him by breaking the law.
“The goal is not to persist, but to ensure the proper application of the law”, explained Advocate General Loïs Raschel, well aware of requesting on sensitive ground, and according to whom the state of necessity cannot be retained because its two conditions are not met: there was no imminent danger – “ [M. G.] could have lived a few more weeks, a few months, maybe more” – and there was no act necessary to safeguard the person – “How can we maintain that we are going to save the person when we are going to help him die? »
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