Death With Dignity

Image via Haral Fischer Varlag

When asked if the state of Montana has the power to keep a terminally ill man alive against his will, Judge Dorothy McCarter ruled, "The Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity, taken together, encompass the right of a competent terminally (ill) patient to die with dignity." Going further, Hon. McCarter wrote, "The patient's right to die with dignity includes protection of the patient's physician from liability under the state's homicide statutes."

Recently, Washington State passed the Death With Dignity Act. On October, 27, 1997, Oregon made history by being the fist state to pass such legislation after a 3 year fight to enact voters' will as demonstrated in the successful 1994 Ballot Measure 16.

Oregon, Washington, Montana (pending further legal challenges), join Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands in their progressive stance on legal aid in dying. In Canada, Sue Rodriguez, suffering from the terminal illness, ALS, posed the question, "Whose body is this?" all the way to the highest courts in the land. Despite losing her legal battles, a physician, in the presence of a member of the Canadian Parliament, assisted Ms. Rodriguez in ending her life. Neither the doctor nor the MP were charged with crimes.

Who is sponsoring the fight against initiatives to allow the practice of physician-assisted suicide (PAS)? Despite internal debate with respect to how PAS aligns with their professional motives, doctors appreciate the protection from the law. Patients, suffering unspeakable anguish and facing the prospect of nothing other than a continuation of such anguish for their remaining heartbeats have mercy available to themselves and their families while maintaining agency over their lives and bodies. Medical ethics groups and other rights' groups tend to look approvingly upon such legal protection, as the question over state force vs. autonomous sovereignty are well argued and reasoned in such instances. In Gonzales vs. Oregon, the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that, "The CSA (Controlled Substances Act) does not allow the Attorney General to prohibit doctors from prescribing regulated drugs for use in physician-assisted suicide under state law permitting the procedure."

So, who is fighting against the Death with Dignity movement and why? For one, some legislators are not bringing such bills to a vote while hiding behind weak excuses such as insurance complexity and legal hang-ups. These are certainly not the causal arguments against PAS. According to the Seattle Times, "the Catholic Church's political arm has aggressively opposed such measures." Yet, that same article notes that a lot of the hangup appears to be lexical, "A 2005 Gallup Poll appeared to show that voters were more enthusiastic — by 17 percentage points — about allowing doctors to take an incurably ill patient's life than to "assist the patient to commit suicide." The question here does not appear to be about faith, as the faithful's opposition generally revolves around the notion that life itself is a god given gift, and that gift requires protection and care.

That argument is noteworthy for its lack of recognition that medicine, not god, has often kept the terminally ill alive. A Christian Scientist, or one of the other groups who refuse medical treatment would be dead long before the terminally ill patients seeking a legal right to death with dignity would ever consider their decision. Moreover, if this is a consideration of faith, why do the faithful get to impose their will on the less-or-non-or-divergently-faithful via the state? Certainly, if a person of faith chooses to die an agonizing death, waiting for the hand of god to take them, they already have every freedom and right available to them to do so. Is it just to allow them to force that decision upon other terminally ill people who may seek a different path?

I do not accept that such force, making death with dignity beyond the law, is just. We are not discussing cases such as that of Terri Schiavo here. Nor are we discussing the admittedly radical stance on suicide I hold and has already been discussed on this blog. Here, we are discussing a very narrow instance of a cognizant and terminally ill person choosing, for themselves to have a prescription for a lethal dose(s) of medication written for them. Again, the question is asked, why shall the state force sufferers of terminal illnesses to live against their will?

Alton Logan, Dale Coventry, and Jamie Kunz: Not Surprisingly, I Was Incorrect

Last night at dinner, Sherry, Tony, Janet and others were discussing the terrible story of Alton Logan. Logan is the man who spent 26 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. The lawyers of another man, Andrew Wilson, had learned of his confession to the crime Logan was improperly imprisoned for weeks after it occurred. Before I go on, part of the reason I am writing this is to apologize to Sherry, Tony and Janet.

At dinner I incorrectly insisted that Wilson's lawyers, Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz, had been officially reprimanded for their concealment of Wilson's admission and the resulting imprisonment of an innocent man for 26 years. They have not. I confused an ethics panel held recently (Nov 3) at Loyola on this matter with an official redress against these lawyers. It was not.

A panel discussion and nothing more, and as I've read about this case, I now understand why. Another man's life, Wilson's, was held in the balance. I'll explain. Over the course of those 26 years Kunz and Coventry, without naming names, consulted with numerous judges, legal scholars, and ethicists about their conundrum. They honestly attempted to do everything in their power or at least counsel, not as lawyers (but that too), but as humans, to free an innocent man without doing so at the expense of one other man's life.

The two lawyers were representing Wilson, the man who confessed to the murder. When he did so, they wrote a sealed affidavit without naming Wilson, so as to protect their client if the document were to be subpoenaed, and simultaneously vindicate Logan. The problem, however, was that Wilson had been convicted of killing two police officers that made him eligible for death row until it was revealed that his conviction for doing so came as a result of torture, beating, and the use of a radiator upon his flesh at the hands of members of the Chicago Police Department. Given this information, he was sentenced to life without parole over death. If, however, he were to be convicted of another murder, he all but certainly would be sentenced to death. Protecting the life of their client, the lawyers pleaded with Wilson to allow them to reveal his secret if he were to die in prison. Then he did. The ethical weight of life on one side of the scale of (in)justice had been removed and the lawyers sprang into action.

One of the more unfortunate aspects of this case was the way it was originally reported by CBS. In that original report, it was made to appear that the 'dirty, rotten, lawyer characters' were holding themselves to a professional code of ethics while an innocent man languished in prison. This is only marginally true. In reality, the lawyers held one man's life on one side of the balance, their client, as another man languished in prison on the other. It is difficult to find silver linings in such a heart wrenching story. Torture, capital punishment, forced confessions, imprisonment while innocent and more, yet, for CBS this story was handled cheaply and incompletely. For CBS this was nothing more than an opportunity to salaciously pit white lawyers, beholden to their professional code of conduct, protecting their client's confidentiality while another man suffered at their expense. Although true, the CBS story intentionally misses the more complicated nature of this terrible intersection of justice and ethics. The lawyers were protecting one man's life at the expense of an innocent man's freedom. That is a very different story than one about client confidentiality.

On that note, and as anything but a legal scholar, I believe there was a way for the lawyers to solve their conundrum. If they were able to secure with prosecutors that the life of their client, Wilson, would not be on the line with the confession to another murder for which a man had already been convicted and sentenced; then, it appears that their ethical challenge would be no longer. Wilson would have been tried for a crime he had confessed to and remained in prison for life without parole on the sentence he had already received for killing two cops and an innocent man would be set free. Why this was not done, or if it is even possible within the law, I am unsure.

Death, Bioethics & Religion

This topic is far more complicated than allowed for in this piece, but the letter is written in such a straightforward and glaring way that it is difficult to avoid or ignore. There are so many issues at play: justice, religion, life / death, suicide, and modernity that it was meant for this group to discuss, and I am suprised to think it has not come up sooner. I found this here, at PZ Meyers's great blog, Pharyngula. I am going to reprint the letter, originally published here, for purposes of easing quotes, etc.

People must accept death at "the hour chosen by God," according to Pope Benedict XVI, leader of the Catholic Church, which is pouring money into the campaign against I-1000.

The hour chosen by God? What does that even mean? Without the intervention of man--and medical science--my mother would have died years earlier. And at the end, even without assisted suicide as an option, my mother had to make her choices. Two hours with the mask off? Six with the mask on? Another two days hooked up to machines? Once things were hopeless, she chose the quickest, if not the easiest, exit. Mask off, two hours. That was my mother's choice, not God's.

Did my mother commit suicide? I wonder what the pope might say.

I know what my mother would say: The same church leaders who can't manage to keep priests from raping children aren't entitled to micromanage the final moments of our lives.

If religious people believe assisted suicide is wrong, they have a right to say so. Same for gay marriage and abortion. They oppose them for religious reasons, but it's somehow not enough for them to deny those things to themselves. They have to rush into your intimate life and deny them to you, too--deny you control over your own reproductive organs, deny you the spouse of your choosing, condemn you to pain (or the terror of it) at the end of your life.

The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don't approve of abortion? Don't have one. Don't approve of gay marriage? Don't have one. Don't approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ's sake, don't have one. But don't tell me I can't have one--each one--because it offends your God.

I am aware that I hold an extreme position on suicide. I believe that all humans (especially those in free and advanced societies) should have all of the means available to them at their choosing, in sickness or in health, happiness or sadness, to end their own lives as they wish--legally, safely, and with as little pain as possible, if they so desire. Are there competing opinions or differing thoughts on this blog? I am curious.