Assisted Suicide Sentencing

A woman who assisted a man’s suicide using a heroin overdose has been jailed for manslaughter. Lyndsay Anne Jones, pleaded guilty to gross negligence manslaughter at Manchester Crown Court. She was jailed for 4 years and six months today. The victim, Philip James Makinson, was found dead at his flat in Bolton on 1st February with a subsequent toxicologist report revealing that he had died as a result of a heroin overdose. Makinson had been suffering from depression following the death of his sister-in-law and mother in late 2012, the collapse of his business and the break-up of his relationship. He had previously made two suicide attempts, the first coming in November 2012 when he cut his own wrists. In the time that followed, Makinson revealed to a close friend that he still wished to take his own life, but that cutting his wrists had been ‘too painful’. That is when he enlisted the help of an acquaintance, Lyndsay Jones, a woman he knew to be a heroin addict. He asked Jones to buy him some heroin and to prepare an injection which would bring about a fatal overdose and on 1st January 2013, this is what she did. However in an attempt to keep more of the heroin for herself, Jones did not give Makinson enough to kill him and he was instead found by friends having suffered a non-fatal overdose. A month later, having recovered from his first attempt, Makinson again enlisted Jones’ help to both obtain and prepare a heroin injection which would bring about his death. This time, Jones and Makinson were successful and having prepared and administered the injection, she left him to die in his apartment. In the hours that followed, Jones panicked about potential evidence left in Makinson’s flat and returned to take his phone, which she knew would contain incriminating text messages. In the days that followed, Jones told her then partner about what she had done. He recorded the conversations on his mobile phone and almost a year later, after the pair had fallen out, he revealed to police what she had said and the recordings he had made. Detective Chief Inspector Richard Jackson said: “This was not like the cases of assisted suicide you read about in the media involving men and women with terminal illnesses who decide to end their suffering in a dignified and peaceful manner. “There was nothing dignified, or peaceful, about Mr Makinson’s death. “He was a man suffering from crippling depression and anxiety, a man who needed professional help for mental health issues which had arisen following the breakdown of his business and relationship. “He needed psychological help, but was instead injected with heroin and left alone to die by a woman whose primary motivation was to obtain drugs for her own use. “This was not a mercy killing. Jones was not motivated by altruism, but by greed, and greed alone. “This is proven by the fact that she failed in her first attempt to kill Mr Makinson because she tried to keep too much of the heroin for herself. “A man came to her in desperation and instead of providing a helping hand, she provided the killer blow by both obtaining and preparing the injection which would eventually kill him. “She then attempted to cover her tracks, returning to the scene of the crime to remove evidence, and was only caught after she admitted what she had done to her then partner.