Italian Right-To-Die Case Cleared

ROME – Italian prosecutors on Tuesday cleared a physician who disconnected the respirator of a paralyzed man who had asked to die, a patients advocate group said.

Dr. Mario Riccio in December assisted in the death of Piergiorgio Welby, a 60-year-old writer with muscular dystrophy whose case had split the Roman Catholic nation.

Anti-euthanasia campaigners and some conservative politicians described Welby’s death as murder. But Riccio, Welby’s family and now prosecutors called it a suspension of therapy. They said the decision conformed to a patient’s right to refuse treatment.

The decision “fully recognizes the right of a citizen to refuse a cure, even when that means certain death,” the Luca Coscioni Association patient advocate group said in a statement.

No one answered the phone late Tuesday at the prosecutors’ office in Rome.

The case had highlighted an apparent contradiction in Italian law: Patients have a constitutional right to refuse treatment, but the Italian medical code requires doctors to keep a patient alive.

An Italian medical board also cleared Riccio last month. He had faced sanctions ranging from a warning to a permanent ban from the medical profession.

Euthanasia is illegal in Italy, and the Vatican, which wields influence over the country’s political and social life, staunchly opposes the practice. Welby was given a lay funeral in Rome after Church officials denied him a religious ceremony.