With new guidance governing prosecutions for assisted suicide due next week, the former TV presenter Ray Gosling's candid confession that he helped a lover die may achieve the opposite to what was (presumably) intended.
Gosling told the East Midlands edition of BBC One's Inside Out that, with a hospital doctor's tacit agreement, he placed a pillow over his gravely ill friend's face until life was extinguished.
This feels a long way from accompanying a loved one to a clinic in Switzerland where a lethal cocktail is consumed.
But Gosling was referring to something that happened, if we are to believe estimates because nobody knows, in the 1980s - long before the existence of Dignitas.
Yet, to use legalese, much of Gosling's dramatic TV confession feels unsafe: he has not revealed the identity of his lover and says he cannot remember when the incident occurred, something that, given the gravity of his action, one would expect to have stuck in the memory banks.
There also seems to be confusion over which hospital the man died in.
In justifying his deed, Gosling says doctors do this sort of thing all the time. Well, yes, but they tend to use morphine to ease the passing rather than death-by-pillow.
Whether Ray Gosling is speaking the truth or inventing some of it, we will only discover in the months ahead. Whichever way, his appearance on Inside Out has set back the pressing case for humane assisted dying.
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