"At last, I will be free of the humiliation of being a living head attached to a lifeless body," said Ramon Sampedro to the ABC news camera in his hospital room in Spain. He then took a sip from a glass of a water and cyanide mixture and was dead twenty minutes later (Brown).
Sampedro was well known throughout Spain for his work to legalize euthanasia after he was paralyzed in a terrible diving accident. He wrote a book about his life after the accident, called Letters from Hell. Because of his inability to move from the neck down, Sampedro wrote this book with the aid of a pen affixed to a long stick, which he manipulated with his mouth (Brown).
Since he was paralyzed, Sampedro needed many friends to aid him in his death. One person bought the cyanide, one mixed the poison, one put it within his reach, another put the straw into Sampedro's mouth, ect, so that no one person was responsible for his death (Brown). .
His love interest, Ramona Maneirio, was arrested for assisting in the suicide, but was later released with no charges. Within a week, over 3,000 people signed a petition saying that they had also aided in Sampedro's suicide (Brown). .
Although this particular case happened half a world away, Sampedro's words echo those of many people in the United States and worldwide. Spain is currently reviewing Sampedro's case and many others like it. Euthanasia is a huge issue currently facing many countries (Brown).
But stories like these do not happen only in far away countries. In fact, it is quite the opposite. A woman from Fresno, California, Isabel Correa, became the forty-first person who Jack Kevorkian aided in committing suicide. It all started when Correa, age sixty, flew from her Fresno home to a hotel in Michigan with her husband, brother in law, and grown children (Chavez A16).
