ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 3, 1996 TAG: 9604030055
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
note: above
TWO FEDERAL COURTS using different rationales have broadened the legal grounds for assisted suicide.
A New York-based federal appeals court Tuesday struck down a New York law making it a crime for a physician to assist in a suicide, ruling that terminally ill people have the same right to hasten death by taking drugs as they do by refusing artificial life supports.
Tuesday's ruling from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, taken together with an earlier one by the California-based 9th Circuit, greatly broaden the legal grounds for terminally ill people who want to speed death with the help of a physician.
The decisions from two coasts and based on two distinctive constitutional grounds put the highly emotional issue squarely on the national agenda.
On one side are people who believe terminally ill persons should be able to end their painful existence; on the other, those who believe the state should condemn suicide and let nature take its course. For many, the dilemma is as wrenching as abortion rights. And, with Tuesday's ruling, the Supreme Court is likely to face the full-fledged right-to-die question before year's end.
In its decision striking down two New York statutes, the 2nd Circuit equated the ability to withdraw from artificial life supports with the ability to take prescription drugs to end life.
The three-judge panel said that because New York allows people to sign waivers refusing resuscitation after cardiac arrest or to forgo artificial life supports, it violates the 14th Amendment's equal-protection guarantee to forbid people to similarly speed death through a prescription for death-producing drugs.
The opinion, written by Appeals Judge Roger J. Minor, said, ``Physicians do not fulfill the role of `killer' by prescribing drugs to hasten death any more than they do by disconnecting life-support systems.''
Minor was joined by Judge Milton Pollack, a district court judge who was sitting by special designation. Appeals Judge Guido Calabresi concurred in a separate opinion.
The significance of the decision allowing physicians to prescribe drugs to competent patients lies in the rationale the court used and the fact that the 2nd Circuit is considered far more moderate than the liberal 9th Circuit, which last month established a fundamental right to physician-assisted suicide.
The 9th Circuit found a right to physician-assisted suicide in the liberty protections of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of due process. Like the right to abortion, carved out by the Supreme Court in 1973, the 9th Circuit's reasoning relies on the right to privacy and an implicit constitutional guarantee of substantive due process of law.
The 2nd Circuit specifically rejected arguments seeking the establishment of a new fundamental right for the terminally ill. Instead it relied on the long-established equal-protection guarantee explicit in the 14th Amendment to attack the way New York law drew a distinction between the withdrawal of life support and taking a fatal drug.
Its reasoning may ultimately draw more support from other courts nationwide and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court.
``Between these two cases, you have two very big strides toward establishing a right to die with dignity,'' said Carla Kerr, a lawyer who represented three physicians and three terminally ill patients who challenged the New York law.
The ruling provoked outrage from the U.S. Catholic Conference. Gail Quinn, the director of the U.S. Bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, called the decision ``further evidence of a depreciation of human life in our society, a depreciation that the courts seem to be buying into hook, line and sinker.''
New York Attorney General Dennis Vacco said he will appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
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