Tony Nicklinson, the 58 year old Englishman who has been trapped in his body for the past seven years by locked-in syndrome following a stroke, has finally died.
He did so just one week after his unsuccessful bid in the High Court, along with another, slightly younger sufferer with the syndrome known only to it as ‘Martin’, to effect a change to the law in England that would enable doctors to kill people like themselves at their behest, without risk of being prosecuted for murder or assisting another to die.
Nicklinson had unsuccessfully sought to persuade judges to acknowledge ‘necessity’ as a legitimate defence of a doctor against murder charges should one face prosecution for it for helping a patient to die at the patient’s request.
