Testing the limits of free speech:
A Faribault nurse who authorities say visited Internet suicide chat rooms and encouraging depressed people to kill themselves is under investigation in at least two deaths and could face criminal charges that could test the limits of the First Amendment.
Investigators said William Melchert-Dinkel, 47, feigned compassion for those he chatted with, while offering step-by-step instructions on how to take their lives.
“Most important is the placement of the noose on the neck ... Knot behind the left ear and rope across the carotid is very important for instant unconciousness and death,” he allegedly wrote in one Web chat.
He is under investigation in the suicides of Mark Drybrough, 32, who hanged himself at his home in Coventry, England, in 2005, and Nadia Kajouji, an 18-year-old from Brampton, Ontario, who drowned in 2008 in a river in Ottawa, where she was studying at Carleton University.
- Analysis from the First Amendment Center.
