Tags : assisted suicide, assisted suicide legality, death panels, montana
Montana Supreme Court Hears Assisted-Suicide Case
The Montana Supreme Court on Wednesday hears arguments on whether to uphold a lower court ruling making physician-assisted suicide a constitutional right. The case in question centers around a former truck driver, Robert Baxter, who died last year of lymphocytic leukemia.
The state’s highest court will consider a district court’s decision in December that the state constitution protects an individual’s right for physician aid in dying.
The lawsuit was filed by Baxter, four physicians who were unable to help terminally ill patients seeking aid in how to end their lives because of the threat of criminal prosecution, and a national non-profit group, Compassion and Choices, that advocates for “comprehensive and compassionate options at the end of life.”
Plaintiffs had submitted to the Montana First Judicial District Court briefs from six family members of terminally ill patients other than Baxter. One of them was a widow whose husband discussed using guns and plastic bags for suffocation to end his suffering from Lou Gehrig’s Disease before finally committing suicide by taking sleeping pills.
If the decision is upheld, it would be the first state supreme court ruling declaring assisted suicide a constitutional right. Two states, Oregon and Washington, have allowed patients he right to make that choice through referendums.
The lawsuit from Baxter, who died the same day the lower court ruling was issued, argues that patients like him “have the right to choose a dignified death, under the State Constitution’s guarantees of privacy and dignity.”
“The decision about how to cross the threshold to death when delivered there by terminal illness is a profoundly personal one,” the plaintiffs say. “Some will choose to cling to life even in the face of unremitting agony. Others will seek a measure of control over the time and manner of death, and the amount of suffering to be endured during their final days, by obtaining medication they can take to hasten death if suffering becomes intolerable. If the Montana Constitution’s guarantees of privacy and dignity protect any decision, surely they protect this one.”
“The only possible justifications for the State to criminalize aid in dying are to vindicate a specific moral view and to protect patients from their own actions. Imposing the moral judgment of the majority upon a minority is prohibited by the Montana Constitution… [which] protects the decision-making power of its citizens in the most intimate and fundamental areas of their lives, particularly where the overlapping rights of privacy, individual dignity, equal protection, and due process are concerned.”
Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock has replied in court documents that physician-assisted suicide should be decided by Montana voters.
“The questions posed are important, and each person’s reactions to them are deeply felt, but the answers are not to be found anywhere in the history, text, or interpretation of the Montana Constitution,” Bullock says. “Plaintiffs debate at length the semantic questions surrounding the unspecified acts they call ‘aid in dying.’ This Court, however, must confront a legal question that euphemisms cannot illuminate: whether the homicide laws are unconstitutional across a broad set of vaguely defined circumstances.”
“Unconstrained by the history of privacy and the practice of medicine in Montana,” Bullock adds. “Plaintiffs’ principle would extend beyond physician-assisted suicide to medical marijuana (as a constitutional matter), the sale of organs, and human cloning. This absolute conception of liberty is alien to this Court’s privacy jurisprudence.”
A number of groups including the American Medical Women’s Association and the Northwest Women’s Law Center, as well as 31 Montana state legislators have filed friend-of-the-court amicus briefs in support of the plaintiffs.
Religious leaders such as the Rev. Canon Gary Waddingham, Episcopal Priest in Billings, the Rev. John Board, Episcopal Deacon in Helena and the Rev. Steve Oreskovich, Episcopal Priest in Missoula, have also filed briefs saying they want to “to ensure that terminally ill Montanans of all faiths are free to make decisions about the time, place, and manner of their death that reflect their personal understanding of life’s meaning, reduce the suffering of their bodies and their minds, and conform to their own ethical and spiritual values.”
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