A disgraced former doctor who helped a middle-aged woman commit suicide due to chronic “neck and back pain” has escaped jail time after pleading guilty to manslaughter.
Stephen P Miller, 85, travelled from his home in Arizona to upstate New York to help Doreen Brodhead get the canister of poison gas she used to end her life in a motel room in Kingston last November.
He was arrested in February when investigators discovered he had been communicating with the 59-year-old woman for six months before her death, after she contacted him through the right-to-die advocacy group Choice and Dignity.
Her attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, said the former pediatrician tried to talk Brodhead out of killing herself before agreeing to help her and only charged her for her expenses to help her die.
“Technically, he broke the law, we accept that,” Lichtman told reporters. “But with the understanding that, morally, Stephen Miller did nothing wrong.”
Stephen P. Miller, 85, has been sentenced to five years’ probation after admitting to the involuntary manslaughter of Doreen Brodhead in a New York motel room last November.
Staff found the 59-year-old man’s body in a bed at a hotel in Kingston, New York.
Super 8 motel staff found Brodhead’s body in a bed in his room on Nov. 9, along with a note and a canister of nitrogen gas.
Surveillance footage revealed that Miller had picked her up from her nearby apartment the day before leaving to buy gasoline.
He took her to the hotel and was seen carrying the tank to his room, then leaving to buy a key after the tank developed a problem with its regulator.
An hour after returning, he drove back to Albany and took a flight back to his home in Tucson.
Miller told investigators that Brodhead hesitated about the plan as she sat with him in the motel room and told him she would miss her mother.
Aiding or causing another person to commit suicide is considered a felony in New York under state law.
Miller was charged with murder and two counts of assault.
Friends said Brodhead attributed her chronic pain to her early career as a dental hygienist and said she had undergone six unsuccessful surgeries in an attempt to find relief.
According to the advocacy group Death with Dignity, physician-assisted dying is legal in ten states, including Maine, New Jersey, Vermont, New Mexico, Montana, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, California, Hawaii and Washington, DC.
Lawmakers in Oregon and Vermont have made deadly drugs easier to access by allowing out-of-state patients to travel and end their lives.
Attorney Jeffrey Lichtman said his client has no plans to assist in any more suicides.
But none of those states allow assisted suicide for people who are not terminally ill.
Miller, who received his medical degree in 1964, was jailed for three years and had his medical license revoked in 2006 after being convicted of a $1 million tax fraud.
His lawyer said he had helped many other people end their lives since leaving prison and had provided “very little technical assistance” to Brodhead in his final hours.
But he insisted that his elderly client would not do it again.
“That part of his life is over,” he added.
Miller faced a possible 25-year prison sentence if convicted on all charges, but reached a deal with prosecutors who dropped assault charges in exchange for admitting to manslaughter.
“Are you pleading guilty because, in fact, you are guilty of second-degree murder?” Judge Bryan Rounds asked him during the brief hearing Tuesday in Ulster County Court.
“By your definition, yes,” Miller replied.
The court accepted his request and sentenced him to five years probation.
Brodhead’s mother, Mary, 91, defended the doctor when contacted by the New York Times earlier this year.
“It was her choice,” she told the outlet outside her Kingston home.
“He didn’t force her to do it.”
