The use of the Sarco suicide capsule has been suspended just weeks after the controversial device claimed its first victim.
The Sarco, the brainchild of suicide apologist Philip Nitschke, ended the life of a 64-year-old American woman on September 23, as Wesley Smith detailed at the time. The capsule, or pod, was placed in a forest near a cabin in Merishausen, Switzerland. A photographer was there to capture the scene. Only Florian Willet, the co-president of The Last Resort, a Swiss organization that champions suicide, was reportedly present for the death. Nitschke, technical adviser to The Last Resort, said that the woman’s death went “well.”
Swiss health minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider suggested in parliament on the day of the pod’s debut death that the Sarco’s use would be illegal. “On one hand, it does not fulfill the demands of the product safety law, and as such, must not be brought into circulation,” she said. “On the other hand, the corresponding use of nitrogen is not compatible with the article on purpose in the chemicals law.” The 64-year-old woman died at an estimated time of 4:01 p.m., Nitschke said in September, which would mean that Baume-Schneider’s comments at the meeting, which was held in the early afternoon, came at least one hour before the first use of the pod.
“When she entered the Sarco, she almost immediately pressed the button,” he said. “She didn’t say anything. She really wanted to die. My estimate is that she lost consciousness within two minutes and that she died after five minutes. We saw jerky, small twitches of the muscles in her arms, but she was probably already unconscious by then. It looked exactly how we expected it to look.” From there, The Last Resort informed the Swiss police of the woman’s death.
After that, police began to arrest and detain several individuals connected to the death. It is unknown if Nitschke was one of them. Willet is now in pretrial detention. Lawyers for the Netherlands-based assisted-suicide organization Exit International, which was founded by Nitschke and is responsible for creating the Sarco, claimed that “only after the Sarco was used was it learned that Ms. Baume-Schneider had addressed the issue. The timing was a pure coincidence and not our intention.”
There were 371 active applications to use the Sarco, all of which have since been suspended pending the criminal investigation.