Opinion ID: 1303274
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the right to die

Text: This Court should not demand that plaintiffs establish an historical right to self determine the quality of life that a terminally ill person must endure. The lead opinion suggests that because the Cruzan Court merely assumed for the purposes of that case that a person has a constitutional right to refuse life-sustaining treatment such a right may not exist. Yet if this Court was squarely presented with that issue, it is doubtful that it would rule contrary to established precedent of this state and others. [5] Even applying the concept of ordered liberty analysis espoused by the lead opinion, the right to refuse life-sustaining treatment can be recognized. In Washington v Harper, 494 US 210; 110 S Ct 1028; 108 L Ed 2d 178 (1990), the United States Supreme Court found that a competent person, even an inmate who suffers from psychotic episodes, has a due process liberty interest to be free from the unwanted administration of antipsychotic medications. [6] Further, in the seminal case, In re Quinlan, supra at 39, the New Jersey Supreme Court explicitly recognized such a right: We have no doubt, in these unhappy circumstances, that if Karen were herself miraculously lucid for an interval (not altering the existing prognosis of the condition to which she would soon return) and perceptive of her irreversible condition, she could effectively decide upon discontinuance of the life-support apparatus, even if it meant the prospect of natural death.    We have no hesitancy in deciding ... that no external compelling interest of the State could compel Karen to endure the unendurable, only to vegetate a few measurable months with no realistic possibility of returning to any semblance of cognitive or sapient life. Both Harper and Quinlan, establish that a competent person has a fundamental right to refuse unwanted medical treatment. But more importantly, Quinlan and its progeny establish that a person has a right to determine whether to continue suffering when faced with an inevitable death and that the state may not compel unwanted lifesaving treatment. Moreover, other jurisdictions have recognized that the state's interest in preserving life includes the duty to protect the right of a person not to die in a demeaning or degrading manner. [7] To recognize the right asserted here is simply a logical extension of the law. [8] As Justice O'Connor stated in Cruzan, supra at 289: Requiring a competent adult to endure such procedures against her will burdens the patient's liberty, dignity, and freedom to determine the course of her own treatment. B. PLANNED PARENTHOOD v CASEY In Planned Parenthood v Casey , the United States Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act and whether its provisions constituted an undue burden on a woman's right to receive an abortion. For our purposes, the most instructive aspect of Casey was its reaffirmance of the basic tenets of Roe v Wade and a woman's fundamental right to receive an abortion. [9] The opinion in Casey recognized that not all the substantive due process rights were identifiable at the time of the drafting of either the Bill of Rights or the Fourteenth Amendment. The framers of the constitution were also aware of this fact and understood that liberty could not be summarized in a single document, no matter how extensive. Justice Harlan's assertion in Poe v Ullman illustrates this principle best: [T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This `liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints, ... and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgments. [ Casey, 112 S Ct 2805, quoting Poe v Ullman, 367 US 497, 543; 81 S Ct 1752; 6 L Ed 2d 989 (1961) (Harlan, J., dissenting). Emphasis added.] Thus, determining the existence of a liberty right involves a textual examination of the constitution, an inward examination of a jurist's beliefs, and an analysis of public inclinations.