New York Times:

ATLANTA — An undercover state investigator told a right-to-die network that he wanted to kill himself. In response, he later testified, officials of the network planned to have him asphyxiate himself with a helium-filled face mask while holding down his arms.
After an investigation, four officials of the group, known as the Final Exit Network, were arrested last month on charges of racketeering and assisted suicide.
The arrests raised questions about whether the group, which has helped some 200 people commit suicide since 2004, merely watched people take the leap into death, or pushed them over the edge.
Officials with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation say the network, which says it has 3,000 dues-paying members in the United States, actively takes part in suicides, an act that is illegal in every state except Oregon and Washington. “The law is clear, and they violated it,” said John Bankhead, a spokesman for the Georgia bureau.
The arrests followed an inquiry in which an investigator posed as a cancer patient and persuaded network members to help him prepare to commit suicide.
According to the agent’s affidavit, network members instructed him to buy a helium tank and a plastic “exit mask.”
Thomas E. Goodwin, who was the network president at the time, and Claire Blehr, a member, planned to hold down the agent’s hands while helium flowed into the mask, the affidavit says.
The agent would lose consciousness within seconds and die within minutes, and the guides would remove evidence from the scene.
“They went through a dry run just to let the agent know what would happen,” Mr. Bankhead said. “Mr. Goodwin got on top of the agent and held down both of his hands,” which investigators say would have prevented him from removing the mask if he had changed his mind during a real suicide.
Georgia authorities arrested Mr. Goodwin and Ms. Blehr, and Maryland officials arrested the group’s medical director, Dr. Lawrence D. Egbert, and a regional coordinator, Nicholas Alec Sheridan, for authorizing member suicides.
The network, based in Marietta, Ga., says it provides only lawful instruction and emotional support, and only to patients with incurable diseases or tremendous suffering.
“Assisted suicide is Jack Kevorkian putting a needle in someone with a deadly substance,” said Jerry Dincin, who became the network president after the arrests. “We provide information that we think is protected under the First Amendment.”