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Constitutional Law Keyed to Choper
Vacco v. Quill
Citation:
138 L.Ed.2d 834 (1997)Facts
In New York, as in most states, it is a crime to aid another to commit or attempt suicide, but patients may 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 are suffering great pain and desire a doctor’s help in taking their own lives, but they were deterred from doing so by New York’s ban on assisted suicide. They, along with three terminally ill patients who have since died, sued the State’s Attorney General, claiming that the ban violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. They argued that because New York permits a competent person to refuse life-sustaining medical treatment, and because this refusal is “essentially the same thing” as physician-assisted suicide, New York’s assisted-suicide ban treats similarly situated persons differently without a rational basis. The District Court rejected this argument, but the Second Circuit reversed, holding that New York law does not treat equally all competent persons who are in the final stages of fatal illness and wish to hasten their deaths.
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