AP News, March 16th, 2007
A French court convicted a doctor Thursday in the poisoning death of a terminally ill cancer patient, in a trial that has raised the issue of euthanasia in France's presidential race.
The court in southwestern Perigueux gave Dr. Laurence Tramois a one-year suspended prison sentence in the Aug. 25, 2003 death of Paulette Druais in the nearby town of Saint-Astier.
Euthanasia is illegal in France. But as the trial opened earlier in the week, the Socialist Party said its presidential candidate, Segolene Royal, will push for a law to allow euthanasia under certain conditions if she is elected in May.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidate for the ruling conservative party, suggested he might favor a law permitting euthanasia, saying recently: "Faced with suffering, we can't just sit there doing nothing."
Francois Bayrou, a center-right candidate who narrowly trails Sarkozy and Royal in polls before the two-round vote on April 22 and May 6, said Monday that such medical cases are for doctors and patients _ not the law _ to decide.
Last week, 2,000 doctors and other medical personnel signed a petition urging the decriminalization of euthanasia and saying they had helped patients die.
In Thursday's verdict, co-defendant Chantal Chanel, a nurse who delivered the fatal dose of potassium prescribed by the doctor, was acquitted.
The case had a family connection: Tramois, 35, is the sister of a daughter-in-law of Druais. In the trial, Tramois expressed regret that science was unable to help the patient.
During the proceedings, Chanel, 40, said she "didn't have the impression of killing, but of helping (Druais) through the passage ... It was the cancer that killed her."
