20 States Urge High Court To Overturn ‘Right-To-Die’ Attorneys General Say Rulings Trample On States’ Rights
Saying that “opposition to suicide is deeply rooted in our nation’s history and tradition,” California Attorney General Dan Lungren urged the U.S. Supreme Court Friday to overturn a pair of appeals court rulings allowing terminally ill people to seek a doctor’s help in dying.
In briefs joined by attorneys general of 19 other states, Lungren argued that the rulings striking down criminal bans on physician-assisted suicides in Washington and New York states trampled on fundamental state rights.
The Republican attorney general argued that the ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals - which led a federal district judge to declare a similar law in California unconstitutional - could be the first step toward sanctioning suicide in many other circumstances.
“The decision does not simply push the states down the so-called ‘slippery slope’ - it hurls them over the precipice into a bottomless pit of constitutional litigation,” Lungren’s brief states.
Public opinion polls show that as many as 74 percent of Americans support the right of terminally ill people to elect to die.
Washington and New York states, as parties to the cases, have filed their own briefs with the Supreme Court. Lungren’s “friend-of-the-court” briefs support those appeals.
“These cases concern more than the creation of a protected ‘right’ allowing doctors or others to assist a person in committing suicide,” Lungren said in a news release. “They are also about the power of federal courts to overrule state law.”
In striking down the Washington law, the 9th Circuit likened the right of physician-assisted suicide to the right to have an abortion, affirmed by the court in 1973. Both raise life-or-death issues and present basic questions about an individual’s right to choose, the court said.
But Lungren argued that physician-assisted suicide does not present the same constitutional “liberty interest” as abortion.
“Abortion concerns the choice of a woman, the decision-maker, to live her life without the danger and unwanted conditions associated with pregnancy,” Lungren said in his brief. “Suicide, on the other hand, is about death, the death of the decision-maker.”
xxxx LIFE OR DEATH DECISION By reviewing appeals court decisions, the Supreme Court is wading into a devisive issue that has been epitomized by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who has helped at least 41 people die. A ruling is expected by next summer.