WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court upheld Oregon’s law on physician-assisted suicide Tuesday, ruling that the Justice Department may not punish doctors who help terminally ill patients end their lives.
By a vote of 6 to 3, the court ruled that Attorney General John Ashcroft exceeded his legal authority in 2001 when he threatened to prohibit doctors from prescribing federally controlled drugs if they authorized lethal doses of the medications under the Oregon Death With Dignity Act. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. dissented from the ruling, joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
| Some other states where assisted-suicide proposals have been discussed:
California: A bill to allow doctor-assisted suicide comes up for a vote in March in the Assembly’s Judiciary Committee. Likely facing defeat, backers of the bill suspended their efforts to win legislative approval of the measure in June. Vermont: Backers of assisted suicide tried unsuccessfully to bring a proposed law to a vote in the Legislature last year. A similar death-with-dignity bill was filed this year and awaits action. Connecticut: A bill was introduced in the General Assembly last year dealing with assisted suicide in response to the prosecution of a man who helped a friend with terminal cancer kill himself. The bill did not survive last year’s legislative session. Hawaii: In 2002, Hawaii came within just three votes of becoming the second state to allow doctor-assisted suicide. Similar bills have stalled in the Legislature since then. Maine: Voters in 2000 narrowly rejected a proposal to allow physician-assisted suicide. The state Legislature rejected similar proposals four times before supporters launched an initiative drive that forced the proposal to the ballot. Michigan: A law enacted in 1998 made physician-assisted suicide a felony. Voters later that year soundly defeated a ballot measure that would have made assisted suicide legal under certain guidelines. Washington: Voters in 1991 rejected a proposal to allow doctor-assisted suicide. The measure would have overturned an existing ban on the practice. |
The ruling lifts the last legal cloud over the law, which is unique in the nation. It also clears the way for other states to consider similar measures.
“This is a watershed decision (that) reaffirms the liberty, dignity and privacy Americans cherish at the end of life,” said Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion in Dying, a group that sponsored the Oregon law.
But the ruling also leaves open the possibility that the Republican-controlled Congress could amend federal drug-control laws and forbid physicians from prescribing lethal medications. Congress also could pass laws explicitly banning doctor-assisted suicide.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said President Bush was disappointed in the decision. “The president remains fully committed to building a culture of life, a culture of life that is built on valuing life at all stages,” he said.
The law has long prohibited suicide as well as aiding another’s suicide. In 1994, however, Oregon’s voters approved the Death With Dignity Act, which authorized doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to dying persons who requested it. Two doctors must confirm the patient is an Oregon resident who suffers from a disease that is likely to end his or her life within six months. The doctors must confirm the patient is of sound mind.
At least 208 people have used medication to end their lives since the law took effect seven years ago.
The Supreme Court itself appeared to endorse states’ rights to take such a step in 1997. While the Constitution does not give individuals a “right to die,” states are free to decide for themselves whether to permit physician-assisted suicide, the court said unanimously in a case from Washington state.
But some social conservatives, including then-Sen. Ashcroft, R-Mo., and Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., strongly opposed the notion of doctors giving patients medicine that would end their lives. They urged the Clinton administration’s attorney general, Janet Reno, to take action against Oregon and its doctors.
She refused, saying she did not have the authority “to displace the states as the primary regulators of the medical profession.” Shortly after taking office in 2001, Attorney General Ashcroft reversed Reno’s decision and declared that a doctor’s use of legal drugs to bring a life to end did not serve a “legitimate medical purpose.”
Citing a federal law against drug trafficking, the attorney general said Oregon’s doctors who persisted in the face of his edict would lose their right to prescribe medication.
But Ashcroft’s order ran into a stiff legal challenge from the start.
Oregon’s state officials and several doctors went to court to block it, and they won at every stage. A federal judge in Oregon, the U.S. court of appeals in San Francisco, and now the Supreme Court ruled that Ashcroft had exceeded his authority.
Writing for the court Tuesday, Justice Anthony Kennedy said Ashcroft had claimed for himself a power Congress had not given him. The federal drug-control act of 1970 gave the attorney general the power to combat “drug dealing and trafficking as conventionally understood,” not the power to tell doctors how they may use legal medications, Kennedy said.
Kennedy said the administration’s position, if upheld, would “delegate to a single executive officer the power to effect a radical shift of authority from the states to the federal government to define the medical practice in every locality.”
When Congress passed the drug trafficking laws, it “did not have this far-reaching intent to alter the federal-state balance,” he concluded in Gonzales vs. Oregon.
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