Assisted Death — A Compassionate Response to a Medical Failure

I argue here that an adjudication of assisted death might follow from it as a compassionate response to one sort of medical failure, rather as something to be prohibited outright or as something to be established a standard policy. This would seem to translate, in law, into allowing and competent medical practice to serve as a defense against a of homicide or of assisting a suicide. By assisted death I mean either, active euthanasia, as now commonly practiced in the Netherlands and proposed in an unsuccessful referendum in Washington State in 1991, or suicide, in which the patient is provided at his or her request with medication or other means to end life, with the knowledge that the intends to use the medication for that purpose.