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Locked-in sufferer Tony Nicklinson dies

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The right-to-die appellant died of natural causes.

Tony Nicklinson, the locked-in syndrome sufferer who last week lost a court battle over his right to euthanasia, died of natural causes this morning, according to his lawyers.

The 58 year old had been left paralysed from the neck down in 2005 after he suffered a stroke while on a business trip to Athens. After losing a High Court battle case to allow a doctor to help him die, he said he was "devastated" and would appeal against the decision.

His family tweeted this morning:

You may already know, my Dad died peacefully this morning of natural causes. he was 58.

They later tweeted:

before he died, he asked us to tweet: 'Goodbye world the time has come, I had some fun'

Here is New Statesman blogger Nelson Jones in an earlier piece on Nicklinson:

A civilised and compassionate society will allow, even encourage, people to make the most of life whatever physical or mental disabilities they may have. We will shortly see at the Paralympics a triumphant demonstration of the fact that disability is no bar to achievement. It's possible to have even Tony Nicklinson's level of disability and lead a positive and worthwhile, even successful, life: just look at Stephen Hawking. But forcing someone to live against their will, as a demonstration of society's attachment to the sanctity of life, is neither civilised nor compassionate.

There is, in fact, no real conflict between the sanctity of life and the right of someone in Tony Nicklinson's position to end it. If human life has any special meaning over and above any other sort of life, it is because human beings are capable of self-reflection, of mental anguish, of conscious suffering, which includes the knowledge that one's suffering will end only in death. In such a case as Tony Nicklinson's, such human characteristics only add to the predicament in which he finds himself. For him, the right to die has become indistinguishable from the right to life.


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