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Constitutional Law Keyed to Chemerinsky
Vacco v. Quill
Citation:
521 U.S. 793 (1997)Facts
New York, like most states, criminalizes assisting suicide while permitting patients to refuse even lifesaving medical treatment. The respondent physicians asserted that they would be willing to prescribe lethal medication for mentally competent, terminally ill patients who were suffering great pain and desired help in taking their own lives, but were deterred from doing so by New York’s ban on assisting suicide. They, along with three terminally ill patients (who subsequently died), sued the state’s Attorney General, claiming that the ban violated the Equal Protection Clause. They argued that there was no rational distinction between allowing a patient to refuse life-sustaining treatment (which could result in death) and prohibiting a physician from prescribing medication that would enable a patient to end their life. The Second Circuit agreed, finding that New York law treated similarly situated persons differently without a rational basis.
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