© The Inquirer/David M. WarrenBarbara Mancini with husband Joe the day after a judge threw out her case.
A Pennsylvania judge threw out an assisted suicide charge Tuesday against a nurse accused of handing her 93-year-old terminally ill father a bottle of morphine, a decision that brought elation and relief to the defendant and her family one year to the day after his death.
The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office failed to prove a crime occurred and based its case against Barbara Mancini on speculation and guesswork, Schuylkill County Judge Jacqueline L. Russell said in a 47-page opinion.
"Needless to say, we're all just elated and very happy and very redeemed," her husband, Joe Mancini, told The
Associated Press. "Now is the time to heal."
Mancini, 57, of Philadelphia, was charged last summer with giving a nearly full bottle of morphine to her father, Joseph Yourshaw, at his Pottsville home in February 2013 for the purpose of helping him end his life. Yourshaw died at a hospital four days later after a hospice nurse called 911.
The judge said that prosecutors had neither established that Yourshaw intended to take his own life, nor that Mancini helped him do it.
Comment: The 'outrage' is understandable given that people today have been led to believe that smoking is the root of all evil, but according to one A.J. Bell, writing in about 1700: And from another source: