The first person to benefit from assisted suicide in Italy, a very tightly regulated practice, died late Thursday morning, the Luca Coscioni Association, which works to legalize the practice, said in a press release.
• Also read: Former tennis player Jelena Dokic almost ended her life after a relationship breakup
Federico Carboni, who was presented in the media under the pseudonym “Mario” to protect his privacy until his death, died after injecting himself with a drug using a special device costing around 5,000 euros, for which the Luca Coscioni association started a fundraising appeal would have.
Federico Carboni, 44, was a truck driver who became paraplegic in 2010 after a traffic accident that fractured his spine.
He had repeatedly applied to the health authorities of the Marche region, a region in the center of the country where he lives, for authorization to carry out assisted suicide. This authorization was denied until the intervention of the legal team of the Luca Coscioni association.
Currently, under Italian law, assisted suicide is punishable by imprisonment from 5 to 12 years.
However, in 2019 the Constitutional Court, Italy’s highest judicial body, introduced an exception for “patients kept alive by treatments”. […] and suffer from an irreversible pathology, a source of physical and psychological suffering that they find unbearable, while remaining fully capable of making free and conscious choices”.
Federico Carboni met all these criteria. “I do not deny that it pains me to say goodbye to life, I would be dishonest and a liar to say otherwise because life is amazing and we only have one” were the last words of Federico Carboni, which was quoted in the press publication.
“I have done my best to live as well as possible (…) but now I have reached the end of my mental and physical abilities (…) I am at the mercy of events, I am totally dependent on others, I’m like a boat floating on the ocean,” he added.
“I’m aware of my physical condition and my prospects, so I’m completely calm and composed about what I’m going to do. Finally I can fly wherever I want,” concluded Federico Carboni.