In the first ruling of its kind, a federal judge struck down a state law against doctor-assisted suicide, declaring on Tuesday that terminally ill people have the right to hasten death.
U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein said that right is the same as the right to choose an abortion or refuse life support.Her decision opens the way for an unidentified 69-year-old victim of emphysema to take his own life with help from a doctor.
The ruling came one day after a Detroit jury acquitted Dr. Jack Kevorkian of violating Michigan's ban on assisted suicide in the death of a man with Lou Gehrig's disease. The man took his own life by inhaling carbon monoxide.
There had been no arrests under the Washington law, which had been on the books since 1854 and carried up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
In ruling on the first federal challenge to a state law banning physician-assisted suicide, Roth-stein quoted from the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 abortion-rights case Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe vs. Wade.
"Like the abortion decision, the decision of a terminally ill person to end his or her life `involves the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime' and constitutes a `choice central to personal dignity and autonomy,' " she wrote.
About 30 states ban assisted suicide. In 1991, Washington voters defeated an initiative to legalize doctor-assisted suicide and euthanasia of terminally ill patients.
The state had argued that the law against assisted suicide was necessary to protect vulnerable people from the influence of those who might not have their best interests in mind and contended there was a significant difference between hastening death and opting not to prolong life artificially.
Rothstein disagreed, saying there is no distinction under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution when the decision is made by "an uncoerced, mentally competent, terminally ill adult."
"There is no more profoundly personal decision, nor one which is closer to the heart of personal liberty, than the choice which a terminally ill person makes to end his or her suffering and hasten an inevitable death," she wrote.
While Kevorkian has been present at 20 deaths in Michigan since 1990, no one in Washington has gone public with an effort to assist in suicides.
The lawsuit was filed in January by four doctors, three people with terminal illnesses, and the group Compassion in Dying, which counsels dying people considering suicide.