ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 1, 1997 TAG: 9702030046
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.
SOURCE: Associated Press
A Florida judge ruled Friday that a man dying of AIDS has the right to commit suicide with the help of a doctor.
Circuit Judge Joseph Davis said his ruling applies only to 35-year-old Charles Hall, the lone survivor in a lawsuit seeking the right to have a doctor prescribe him a lethal dose of drugs without interference from the state.
Hall ``has a constitutional right to decide to terminate his suffering and determine the time and manner of his death,'' Davis said.
And Hall's physician, Dr. Cecil McIver, who has agreed to write the prescription, cannot be prosecuted for his role in the death, the judge said.
``As an individual and a physician, he can determine his own ethical, religious and moral beliefs in declining or agreeing to assist,'' Davos said. ``Like Mr. Hall, he has the freedom of choice.''
Davis' ruling marks the first time any state judge in the nation has supported doctor-assisted suicide, said Douglas Kmiec, a constitutional law professor at Notre Dame. ``I do expect more of the same,'' Kmiec said.
The state said it will appeal, which would automatically stay the decision. The state has argued that doctor-assisted suicide is manslaughter, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
``This is just the first step in the process of getting it to the Florida Supreme Court,'' said Assistant Attorney General Michael Gross.
McIver and three patients argued in the lawsuit that a privacy provision in the state constitution gives dying but mentally competent people the right to obtain a lethal prescription from a willing physician.
Hall, battling pneumonia, couldn't make it to the courthouse but listened by telephone hookup from his home in rural Beverly Hills on Florida's Gulf Coast. ``I'm just a basket case,'' he said later. ``I can't talk now.''
His lawyer, Robert Rivas, argued that the ban on physician-assisted suicide was enacted in 1868 for religious reasons and was a relic of a time when diseases killed people much faster.
Hall said he contracted the AIDS virus through a blood transfusion in 1981. His complications over the years have included a brain cyst, hepatitis B and partial blindness.
Oregon is the only state with a law allowing physician-assisted suicide, but the measure - passed by voters in 1994 - has not taken effect because a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional. The Supreme Court is considering challenges to assisted-suicide bans in New York and Washington state.
Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said he expects the Florida ruling to have limited impact.
``It might well have persuasive force, but there is only so much that one lower court judge can do in moving the behemoth of American law,'' said Tribe, who represented doctors challenging a New York ban on physician-assisted suicide before the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 8.
In Florida, the state had argued that it is often difficult to know who is terminally ill and that some people who doctors thought were going to die have experienced unexpected remissions.
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