The Fifth Chamber of the Court of Appeals of Santiago, hosted, in divided judgment, an appeal brought by Gendarmerie in order to “preserve the life” of an inso of Punta Peuco who applied to be “exiled” from Chile to submit to euthanasia.
The inso in question is the retired colonel of the Army, Jorge Muñoz Pontony, 83, who serves a 15-year sentence in that prison for a double homicide on 27 September 1973, of which he claims to be innocent. In fact, last year he sent a letter to President Sebastián Piñera requesting exile to a country where euthanasia is legalized.
According to the newspaper El Mercurio, the judges who welcomed the ruling determined that Gendarmerie can “take the necessary measures to demand the preservation of the life, integrity and health of the insoture”, who has initiated several hunger strikes and was diagnosed with cardiogenic syncope first-degree AV blockage, so he was recommended a pacemaker that he rejects.
In this regard, they say that Gendarmerie must protect, as an organ of the State, “a kind of ‘privileged’ responsibility in relation to the life and health of persons deprived of liberty, since they, unlike others, are under a restriction of their expression of autonomy”.
“In our constitutional regulations and atypent legislation, the right to life and physical and mental integrity of every person is recognized, which finds its proper correlation in the punitive sanction of our legislator establishes in respect of any act that allows a collaboration to generate the death of another, as is the case with the crime of cooperation to suicide contained in article 393 of the Penal Code” , details the sentence.
The only minister who voted against it was Paula Plaza, who considered that “the inmate is the holder of the rights” to life and physical and psychic integrity, and an action such as her forced feeding would generate “nullify her autonomy and the possibility of freely manifesting her will to keep life in the foma she deems dignified”.
“Muñoz has freely taken the decision not to eat food, as there is no precedent that leads to the belief that such a decision is not voluntary or has been provoked by third parties,” he said.
