Washington – The Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s challenge to the nation’s only right-to-die law Tuesday and ruled that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft overstepped his authority when he sought to punish the Oregon doctors who helped terminally ill people end their lives.
The 6-3 decision was a victory for states and their independent-minded voters and a defeat for social conservatives.
The case also found new Chief Justice John Roberts in the camp of the court’s most conservative members. Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were the dissenters.
The court majority said the states – not federal authorities – have long had the power to regulate the practice of medicine and the licensing of doctors. They said Ashcroft was claiming an “extraordinary authority” to impose his own view on what is proper medical care for those who are near death.
The decision clears the way for other states to consider similar measures.
“This is a watershed decision (that) reaffirms the liberty, dignity and privacy Americans cherish at the end of life,” said Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion in Dying, a group that sponsored the Oregon law.
But the ruling also leaves open the possibility that the Republican-controlled Congress could amend federal drug-control laws and forbid physicians from prescribing lethal medications. Congress also could pass laws banning doctor-assisted suicide.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said President Bush “remains fully committed to building a culture of life, a culture of life that is built on valuing life at all stages.”
In 1994, Oregon’s voters approved the Death With Dignity Act, which authorized doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to dying persons who requested it. Two doctors must confirm the patient is an Oregon resident who “suffers from a terminal disease” that is likely to end his or her life within six months. The doctors must confirm the patient is of sound mind.
At least 208 people have used medication to end their lives since the law took effect seven years ago.
Writing for the court Tuesday, Justice Anthony Kennedy said Ashcroft had claimed for himself a power Congress had not given him.
The federal drug-control act of 1970 gave the attorney general the power to combat “drug dealing and trafficking as conventionally understood,” not the power to tell doctors how they may use legal medications, Kennedy said.
Scalia wrote that the court should have deferred to Ashcroft’s decision.
“It is perfectly consistent with an intelligent ‘design of the statute’ to give the nation’s chief law enforcement official, not its chief health official, broad discretion over (those who prescribe medication),” he wrote.
