A former doctor who traveled from Arizona to Kingston to help a local woman end her own life has pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Under the terms of a plea agreement worked out with prosecutors, Stephen P. Miller, 85, will serve five years of probation in his home state.

Prosecutors say that Miller traveled to Kingston in November 2023 to meet up with 59-year-old Doreen Brodhead. Brodhead apparently came into contact with Miller through an online network of proponents of assisted suicide. Miller serves on the advisory board of the Arizona-based nonprofit Choice and Dignity. The group provides resources for people who wish to end their lives, including seminars on the best methods and training for “exit guides” who provide assistance and emotional support during the process.

Miller was with Brodhead in a room at the Super 8 Motel on Washington Avenue on Nov. 9 when she took her own life using a plastic hood and a cannister of nitrogen gas. The inert-gas method is specifically highlighted in Choice and Dignity training as offering a clean, painless and certain method to end one’s life. Prosecutors say Miller procured the gas and the plastic hood and was with Brodhead when she died. But Miller’s attorney, high-powered Manhattan litigator Jeffery Lichtman, has argued that his client merely provided compassionate emotional support to Brodhead and did not actually operate the gas or otherwise participate in her death. Brodhead, a Kingston native, had long suffered from chronic neck and back pain, but did not have a terminal diagnosis, prosecutors said.

Police initially believed that Brodhead was alone when she killed herself. But upon learning that there was someone else in the room the night of her death, Kingston police and the Ulster County District Attorney’s Office opened an investigation and identified Miller as Brodhead’s companion on the night of her death. On Feb. 2, Miller, following extradition proceedings in Arizona, returned to Kingston where he was arraigned on charges of second-degree manslaughter and two counts of felony assault. He faced a maximum of 5-15 years in state prison if convicted. County Court Judge Bryan Rounds set bail $500,000 which Miller posted immediately. The high bail reflected Miller’s prior criminal history. In 2008 while working as an addiction specialist in Texas, Miller was convicted on tax evasion charges, stripped of his medical license and served time in federal prison.

Under the terms of a plea agreement, Miller agreed to plead guilty to a single count of manslaughter while the assault charges were dropped. In exchange, Rounds imposed the probationary sentence. According to media reports, Rounds took Miller’s age and ill health into account in accepting the plea agreement. In a statement announcing the conviction, District Attorney Emmanuel Nneji said that regardless of his motives, Miller’s actions constituted a crime under state law which makes no provision for assisted suicide. Nneji added that actions like Millers’, if unpunished could open a “Pandora’s Box” of bad actors masking homicides as assisted suicides. Nneji said people like Brodhead could best be helped by connecting them to resources for medical, psychiatric or family intervention.

“This defendant has taken accountability for his conduct in this county. His actions led to the death of another person in this community at her most desperate time,” said Nneji. “Death by any means is not an appropriate answer or response to the despair that some or many of us experience. The rationale for his actions do not take away from the fact that they are criminal under our laws.”

Editor's note: The national suicide and crisis hotline can be reached by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.