Family ‘pinned down right to die patient as doctor gave her lethal jab’

A WOMAN of 74 suffering with dementia had to be held down by her family as she appeared to struggle against a lethal injection, an inquiry has revealed.

The patient wrote an ‘advance directive’ asking to be killed if the disease became too severe.

But whenever the issue of asking to die was raised, she also added: ‘Not now.’ Nevertheless, after she was admitted to a care home its specialist doctor was persuaded by the Dutch woman’s husband that she wanted the lethal injection.

Now prosecutors in the Netherlands are launching a criminal investigation into a ‘possible punishable case of euthanasia’, adding: ‘There is a serious suspicion the physician committed a criminal offence.’

On the day appointed for the death, the doctor gave the patient a sedative in a cup of coffee. She later explained the drug was hidden in the coffee because the patient ‘would probably have refused had she been asked to take the medication herself’.

Some 40 minutes later, the woman was injected with a further dose of sedative because the first was having ‘insufficient effect’.

The report said the woman then appeared to become unaware of her surroundings, and the doctor prepared to inject her with a lethal dose of the drug thiopental.

It said: ‘When the physician tried to administer the thiopental, the patient sat up. This is what the physician had previously referred to as physical resistance.

‘The family then held her and the physician quickly administered the rest of the euthanatic.’

The case was disclosed in a report by the Dutch euthanasia watchdog, the Regional Euthanasia Review Committees, published 18 months after the death of the woman in the spring of 2016.

In conclusions condemning the doctor, the watchdog said she could not have been sure the woman had wanted to die. It said that in carrying out the decision to kill the patient, the doctor ‘overstepped a boundary’.

By giving a sedative covertly in a cup of coffee she had ‘wanted to deprive the patient of the possibility to resist... [and then] when the patient did respond negatively, the physician wrongly failed to consider whether this could be interpreted as an important sign that she did not want a needle to be inserted’.

The violent death of the woman is now at the centre of a major criminal investigation that may lead to the first ever prosecution of a doctor over the treatment of a patient under the euthanasia laws that have operated in the Netherlands for the past 15 years.

Neither the woman nor the care home doctor – who injected her with the same lethal drug used to execute death row prisoners in the United States – have been named. The report added that ‘when performing euthanasia, coercion, and anything that might suggest coercion, must be avoided’.

It called the claim that the woman’s death was carried out with proper medical care ‘untenable’.

The doctor said she carried out the procedure because the dementia had made the patient’s suffering ‘unbearable’ – the criteria for death under Dutch law.

But the Dutch prosecution authority, the Board of Procurators General, said the ‘advance directive’, or living will, drawn up by the woman that led to her death was ‘ambiguous and contradictory’.