Physician-Assisted Suicide and the Right to Care

In the same week that Dr Jack Kevorkian was acquitted for assisting in two suicides in Michigan,[1] the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit made a more critical judgment. On March 6, 1996, that federal court found that Washington State's law prohibiting physician-assisted suicide was unconstitutional.[2] Overturning their colleagues who sat on a three-judge Court of Appeals panel,[3] the full Circuit decided 8-3 that there is a constitutional right to die. For the majority, Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote that: