Federal Court Upholds Oregon's Assisted Suicide Law

By ADAM LIPTAK
May 26, 2004

A federal appeals court today rejected an effort by the Justice Department to
block the only law in the nation authorizing doctors to help their patients
commit suicide.

The decision, by a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, upheld Oregon's Death with
Dignity Act.

The majority used unusually pointed and personal language to rebuke Attorney
General John Ashcroft for overstepping his authority.

"The Attorney General's unilateral attempt to regulate general medical practices
historically entrusted to state lawmakers," Judge Richard Tallman wrote for the
majority, "interferes with the democratic debate about physician-assisted
suicide and far exceeds the scope of his authority under federal law."

The Oregon law, the product of a 1994 voter initiative, allows adults with
incurable diseases who are likely to die in six months to obtain lethal drugs
from their doctors. The doctors may prescribe but not administer the drugs, and
they are granted immunity from liability. About 30 people a year have used the
law to end their lives since the law became effective in 1997. That represents
about one in every thousand deaths in Oregon.

In 1997, Mr. Ashcroft, then a United States Senator, asked Attorney General
Janet Reno to declare that assisted suicide involving doctors violated federal
law. She declined, saying that individual states should be allowed to regulate
their own doctors. When Mr. Ashcroft became attorney general in 2001, he
reversed Ms. Reno's position and issued a directive saying that doctors who
prescribe lethal drugs to patients could face prosecution.

A doctor, a pharmacist, several terminally ill patients and the state of Oregon
challenged that directive in 2001. Judge Robert Jones, of the federal district
court in Oregon, sided with the plaintiffs in 2002.

In its ruling today, the appeals court said that upholding Mr. Ashcroft's
directive would have a high human toll.

"Doctors will be afraid to write prescriptions sufficient to painlessly hasten
death," Judge Tallman wrote. "Pharmacists will fear filling their
prescriptions. Patients will be consigned to continued suffering and, according
to the declarations of record, may die slow and agonizing deaths."

Kevin Neely, a spokesman for Oregon's attorney general, Hardy Myers, said the
ruling was "a slam-dunk victory for the state of Oregon."

"Decisions regarding medical practice are decisions for the state and the state
alone to make," he said. "Attorney General Ashcroft simply abused his authority
in this matter."

Judge J. Clifford Wallace, in a dissenting opinion, said the attorney general
had the necessary authority to issue his directive.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company