Final Exit Network

Final Exit Network, Inc. (FEN) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit right to die advocacy group incorporated under Florida law.

Final Exit Network was founded in 2004 by former members of the Hemlock Society, including that organization's co-founders, Derek Humphry and Dr. Faye Girsh.

Where Compassion & Choices' focus is on legislative reform and advocating for and law change, the Final Exit Network concerns itself with what it believes to be the immediate issue of self-deliverance.

Guides provide services including companionship during death, education, advice regarding the discovery of remains and facilitation of conversations with friends and family.

[21] In the Minnesota case of Doreen Dunn, the attendant exit guides were determined by the state to have removed the equipment with which she had ended her life.

Jana Van Voorhis was a 58-year-old Phoenix, Arizona woman with a history of mental illness whose suicide was allegedly assisted by the Final Exit Network in 2007.

[citation needed] In plea bargains, two of the defendants, senior exit guide Wye Hale-Rowe and case coordinator Roberta Massey, each pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge of facilitation to commit manslaughter.

Before his retrial, scheduled for August 4, 2011, Langsner accepted a plea bargain on one misdemeanor count of endangerment and was sentenced to one year probation, following which his record would be expunged.

[26] On February 25, 2009, four members of the Final Exit Network were arrested on charges of assisting the suicide of a cancer patient, John Celmer, of Cumming, Georgia.

[32] Doreen Nan Dunn was an Apple Valley, Minnesota, woman who had suffered from intense pain since 1996 following a botched medical procedure.

Four members: then-medical director Dr. Lawrence Egbert, then-case coordinator Roberta Massey, and exit guides Ted Goodwin and Jerry Dincin (Goodwin's successor as president) were also charged individually in the 17-count indictment, which included felony counts of assisting in a suicide and gross misdemeanors of interfering with a death scene.

District Court Judge Karen Asphaug dismissed all charges against Ted Goodwin on March 22, 2013 on grounds that the allegations against him did not constitute a crime.

She also held that the Minnesota law prohibiting advising a suicide was unconstitutional because the language was too broad; she also dismissed a charge of interfering with a death scene.

Final Exit Network's attorney, Robert Rivas, acknowledged that Egbert and Dincin were in Dunn's presence when she died, but he asserted that the state (represented by prosecutor Phil Prokopowicz) had no proof that the men physically assisted in her death.

It was fined $30,000 by Judge Christian Wilton on the charge of assisting in a suicide and was also required to pay nearly $3,000 in restitution to Dunn's family for funeral expenses.

Interviewees include organization founder Derek Humphry, Dr. Timothy E. Quill, and Barbara Coombs Lee of Compassion & Choices.

[46] In 2016, the legal cases against Final Exit Network were also featured in Season 2, Episode 12 of Vanity Fair Confidential, a series on the Investigation Discovery cable channel.