"US man guilty of assisting suicide gets jail time" Associated Press October 16, 2014
FARIBAULT, Minn. — A former nurse in Minnesota who admitted to going online and preying upon suicidal people — encouraging two to take their lives — must serve nearly six months in jail as part of a sentence handed down Wednesday.
William Melchert-Dinkel, 52, was sentenced to three years in prison in the deaths of an English man and a Canadian woman, but he won’t have to serve the prison term if he complies with conditions of his probation that include the jail time.
‘‘I am sorry . . . for my actions and what I have done,’’ Melchert-Dinkel said in court.
Melchert-Dinkel was convicted in September of one count of assisting a suicide and one count of attempting to assist a suicide in a case that has played out for years and resulted in a reversal of his prior convictions and a change to Minnesota law.
Minnesota authorities began investigating in March 2008 after an antisuicide activist in Britain claimed someone in the state was using the Internet to manipulate people into killing themselves.
That's the old "the heavy metal rock music made my kid do it," and it feels like a trap to censor Internet speech.
Authorities found e-mails in which Melchert-Dinkel gave a man technical advice on how to hang himself and online chats in which he tried to talk a woman out of her plans to jump into a river and instead hang herself with him.
I've reversed myself on the elite. I want them all alive to sweat out the damn mess they have created and get on with the troublesome work of managing the planet.
Sure, they are getting obscenely wealthy but at what price their karmic souls?
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Related:
What a Dinkel
Dinkel, Part Deux
Dinkel Tinkle Little Star
As darkness descends this hour on the East Coast.
