Editorials
The euthanasia follies ¥wo courts have declared for physician-assisted suicide. On May 2, a Michigan jury acquitted Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who had been indicted on a charge of assisting the suicide...
...Kevorkian certainly assisted Thomas Hyde in dying, but apparently not on the site where the body was found...
...The unrelenting logic of Judge Rothstein's decision verges on the simplistic...
...as evidence he offered a video of the suicided man asking to have his pain relieved...
...While the Kevorkian trial seemed in news reports to combine an episode from a soap opera with snippets from a high school debate—a tear jerker seasoned with sophomoric reasoning—the federal court decision is another matter...
...In an exercise of judicial nullification, she overturns the decision of Washington State voters in 1991 to vote against Initiative 119 which favored physician-assisted suicide...
...Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State...
...Furthermore, the judge collapses any distinction between allowing to die and direct killing by finding no constitutionally meaningful difference between the withdrawal of life-sustaining medical treatment and the provision of the medical means to end life in the case of terminally ill, competent patients...
...It evoked a sense of our vincibility and mortality...
...But this ill-conceived effort at jury nullification pales in light of the decision announced the following day, May 3, by Federal Judge Barbara Rothstein...
...The death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reminded Americans of a time when our politics was full of hope and our future full of possibilities...
...It recalled the woman who in 1963 and in the thirty years since personified a dignity and probity now sadly diminished in our leaders and our culture...
...never since have we been so completely and wholeheartedly gathered as a nation...
...It's a cliff (Washington Post, May 13,1994...
...Jack Kevorkian, who had been indicted on a charge of assisting the suicide of a thirty-year-old man suffering from a degenerative nerve disease...
...Hyde to control his pain...
...This technicality, which police and prosecutor might have dealt with beforehand, the judge ruled exculpatory...
...The first lady's stoic grace and sense of purpose in the days following John Kennedy's death held the country together...
...why isn't it a right that will be visited upon still others—incompetent, poor, old, or nonproductive...
...Having enunciated this newly found constitutional right, the judge also cavalierly dismisses objections that the right will be claimed by others than the suffering, competent, terminally ill who request that a physician kill them...
...Her death on Thursday, May 19, brought back those images of a black-veiled young woman with two small children and a riderless horse...
...The judge finds warrant for her opinion in the Fourteenth Amendment support given Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, where it was dealing with a woman's right to choose an abortion: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life...
...Charles Krauthammer aptly observes: "This is not a slippery slope...
...Kennedy a widow at the age of thirty-three exposed the darker corners of human nature that American naivete and exceptionalism prefer to keep at bay...
...So much for the rule of law in the state of Michigan...
...R.I.P...
...She let the current law stand pending appeal...
...Memory of that time has dimmed: an exuberant sense of national purpose tarnished by the violence of a terrible war and the corruption of the public trust...
...The brutal assassination that left Mrs...
...Judge 3 Rothstein finds the argument in Casey "almost prescriptive" on the matter of allowing a terminally ill person to have physician assistance in committing suicide...
...In effect, the judge rules, there is no legal difference between removing a respirator and injecting a lethal overdose of morphine...
...After all, if this is "a right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe," why isn't it a right, given time and human proclivities, that will be claimed by others suffering but not terminally ill...
...Seeming to have little solid instruction in the law from either judge or prosecutor and weeping on the dead man's behalf, the jurors decided that if he died in the process of trying to control his pain that was okay with them...
...We dare to hope that the Supreme Court, which has had to perform a high wire act to preserve Roe—the most flagrant example of legislating from the bench—will correct Judge Rothstein's logic and her folly...
...The confusions of the Kevorkian trial—as confusing perhaps to the jurors as to the rest of us—call the acquittal into question...
...May she rest in peace...
...Judge Rothstein did make one defensible decision...
...Kevorkian, who otherwise plays the role of principled advocate for physician-assisted suicide, chose in this trial both to rely on the venue technicality and to blur the issue of assisted suicide by claiming he was merely helping Mr...
...Her decision not only legalizes euthanasia but declares it a constitutionally protected right...
...A day later, a federal district court judge in Seattle found unconstitutional a Washington State law prohibiting assisted suicide, including physician-assisted suicide...
Vol. 121 • June 1994 • No. 11
