Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Lawyers Keep Suicide Law Litigation Alive Right To Life Lawyers Want To Refile Lawsuit To Overturn It

Associated Press

Oregon’s assisted suicide law will be back in court today, when a federal judge considers whether National Right to Life lawyers should be allowed to refile their lawsuit seeking to overturn it.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the dismissal of the 1994 lawsuit last year.

But U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, who previously ruled the law unconstitutional, agreed to consider a request to refile the lawsuit on different grounds.

Most legal experts think the maneuver doesn’t have a chance, but assisted suicide supporters still are uncertain.

“Judge Hogan has been a component of this litigation that has caused people to second-guess what would be otherwise the expected result,” said Eli Stutsman, representing sponsors of the Death With Dignity Act.

“He’s incredibly tolerant of the plaintiff’s efforts to keep this litigation alive.”

Within weeks of the 1994 vote that approved Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act, which allows doctors to prescribe lethal drugs by request to terminally ill patients, opponents had persuaded Hogan to issue an injunction temporarily blocking the law from taking effect.

In 1995, Hogan ruled that the law violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

But in early 1997, the 9th Circuit Court ruled that the plaintiff in the lawsuit, a woman with muscular dystrophy, did not have standing to sue and overturned Hogan. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

Voters in November resoundingly reaffirmed the nation’s only assisted suicide law.

A few weeks later, Hogan complied with the 9th Circuit’s order by dismissing the lawsuit, but he left the door open a crack by agreeing to consider a request to amend the lawsuit and start the process again.

Specifically, National Right to Life lawyers want to gain standing in the case by claiming that their client suffers a “stigmatic injury.”

Courts have recognized such an injury when a law stigmatizes a class of people, said Rich Coleson, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys.

The assisted suicide law, by providing an exception to Oregon’s law banning suicide, effectively singles out the terminally ill as having lives less worth living, he said.

The argument “has been used in discrimination cases, and our argument is that this is a discrimination case,” he said. Terminally ill people are “being treated as second-class citizens.”

Arthur LaFrance, a professor at Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College, said the argument was successful in a case in which lawyers were excluding black jurors because of their race.

“The courts said that a segment of the population may not be stigmatized by exclusion from jury service even though in the usual sense they did not suffer injury since they were not involved in the case as parties,” he said.

However, LaFrance does not believe the argument applies to assisted suicide.