Opinion ID: 1442532
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Absence of Judicial Power

Text: Article 6, section 6 of the Nevada Constitution gives to the district court the power to decide cases. This is not a case. A case is defined as a controversy, at law or in equity; a question contested before a court of justice. [1] As this court has put it, the exercise of judicial power must be confined to controversies in the true sense. The parties must be adverse.... [2] There is no controversy here. The state's attorney even went so far as to tell the trial court that there does not appear to be any controversy between the attorney general's office and Mr. Bergstedt. I do not want to belabor the point because it is so obvious. There has never been any controversy here and no question contested before a court of justice because at all times, even on appeal, everyone has been in cordial agreement as to what the outcome was going to be. Not only did the nonadversarial, nonantagonistic posture of this case deprive the trial court of its constitutional power to decide the claims presented by Mr. Bergstedt, it deprived the court of the truth-seeking benefits ordinarily attached to the adversary system. This is an agonizingly difficult case and a unique one, a case desperately in need of a two-sided debate. If there had been a life-side versus a deathside to this case, surely the life-side would at least have raised the point that the plaintiff's case must fail because it sought court approval of a killing act, an act which knowingly caused the immediate death of a human being. As I indicate below, this would have been a strong argument to be made under the circumstances of this case. I know of no court that has adopted a rule which sanctions suicide [3] by a conscious, competent and alert human being who was not dying and who was expressing a frank desire for immediate self-destruction. [4] There are a number of novel and perplexing questions to be answered in this case. I certainly would have had an easier time in dealing with these questions if they had been properly and adversarily litigated in the court below. The trial court did not have the constitutional power to decide a noncontroversy and then to take the action that it did; but even if this had been a real case, I maintain that the trial court had no power to sanction or facilitate by court decree Kenneth Bergstedt's announced plan to take his own life by means of the mortal killing act of taking away his breathing apparatus. The Nevada Supreme Court's affirmance of the district court's decree may make it law, but it does not make it true. [5]