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No longer safe

The Crown Prosecution Service is showing callous indifference to the taking of human life.

Not only has it declined to prosecute in cases recently publicised by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society in which sick people died needlessly, though by their own wish. There is now a report (Guardian Unlimited 19th January) that a coroner will at last investigate the deaths of sixteen elderly residents of the Maypole nursing home in Kings Heath, Birmingham (now closed). The Guardian states that the home came to the attention of officials after a resident choked to death. It was then found that twenty-eight had died in one year, 2002, though in the previous year only nine deaths had occurred.

In 2003 the two GPs running this home were suspended during a Police investigation started off by an anonymous whistle blower. No charges were brought. One doctor is practising again.

In Derby, an inquest is finally being conducted into the deaths of eleven patients in a psychiatric hospital in the 1990's (See "A chilling foretaste").

For the past ten years the Crown Prosecution Service policy has paved the way for the Mental Capacity Bill, which will make doctors immune from prosecution if they end the lives of helpless patients in their so-called "best interest."

E. Chowdharay-Best - 22nd January 2005.

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