Oregon Attorney Lawyer

Taking on one of the most important constitutional questions of the decade, the Supreme Court yesterday expressed grave concerns over the implications of declaring that dying patients have a right to a doctor’s help in committing suicide.

During the solemn two-hour hearing, the justices pursued not just legal questions, but evolving societal attitudes, the role of modern medicine, their own personal experiences and moral considerations that thread through the emotional issue. In the end, it appeared a majority would not vote to establish a right to physician-assisted suicide.

As hundreds of demonstrators gathered on the white marble plaza outside the courthouse, many of them in wheelchairs and carrying signs that read “Not Dead Yet,” the justices took up a pair of cases that could ultimately alter the way the legal system recognizes the right to die in America.

Although the issue had been simmering for some time, it burst onto the national agenda when two appeals courts, one from each coast, upheld a right to doctor-assisted suicide. Officials from the two states involved in those rulings, New York and Washington, have brought the twin cases to the Supreme Court, hoping for a ruling that would overturn the lower courts and uphold a state’s right to ban assisted suicide.

In a time of advancing medicine and an aging population, the issue has captured the public’s attention in a way that few legal questions do, dividing the medical community, legal scholars and the terminally ill, who appear to have the most at stake. Scores of people, some of whom had camped out in frigid temperatures in hopes of claiming one of the 50 seats available to the public, were turned away before the arguments began.

“Most of us have parents or other loved ones, and we’ve lived through a dying experience that forces us to think about these things,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at one point.

The Supreme Court first addressed the question of a right to die in 1990, when in the case of a Missouri woman thrust into a vegetative state by a car accident, the court ruled that a person has a constitutionally protected right to refuse unwanted medical treatment. But that ruling involved the rather passive withdrawal of artificial life supports in a case brought by the parents, who wanted to disconnect their daughter’s feeding tube.

Yesterday’s question poses a more difficult dilemma and puts the physician in the active role of bringing on death by providing the lethal injection or other means of ending a patient’s life. If the Supreme Court were to uphold lower court rulings finding a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, states would be able to regulate the practice but not ban it, as a majority now do.

A decision in the paired cases will be handed down before the court recesses this summer.

This is not an issue of simply “choosing to die,” Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist noted. “It’s that they want assistance from a physician to do it, that’s what we’re arguing about.”

Justice David H. Souter, one of the justices more inclined to protect issues of personal privacy, suggested that it might be too soon for the high court to assess the risks of making assisted suicide legal or to weigh patients’ interests in being free of pain and suffering. “It may be impossible for a court to assess that sensibly for a long time until there is more experience out in the world,” he said.

The state of Oregon has approved a law legalizing physician-assisted suicide, but that law is tied up in the courts.