Another Snub for Bush: Oregon Suicide Law Upheld
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Another Snub for Bush: Oregon Suicide Law Upheld
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Independent - 18 January 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article339304.ece
Snub for Bush as suicide law is upheld by judges
By Andrew Gumball
An Oregon law that allows doctor-assisted suicide, the only one of its
kind in the United States, was upheld by the Supreme Court in an
embarrassing defeat for the Bush administration, which has spent five
years trying to overturn it.
The High Court justices voted 6-3 in Oregon's favour, saying the state
had every right to pass such a law without federal interference. Justice
Anthony Kennedy, writing the majority opinion, said the former attorney
general John Ashcroft's attempt to claim a higher authority and revoke
the prescription-writing licences of participating doctors was "both
beyond his expertise and incongruous with the statutory purposes and
design".
Oregon voters have twice approved the assisted suicide law, which
requires two doctors to confirm terminally ill patients wanting to take
advantage of it are capable of making the decision on their own. Since
1997, when the Death With Dignity Act was first passed, more than 200
people have used it to end their lives.
The Clinton administration raised an objection but the ardently
religious Mr Ashcroft turned it into a personal cause - even after the
11 September attacks when his office was supposedly focused on tracking
down possible al-Qa'ida cells in the United States.
The case was marked by a political irony, since conservatives usually
uphold the cause of self-determination by individual states - and
liberals more commonly granter greater leeway to federal authority. In
this case, it was the conservatives on the Supreme Court, including new
Chief Justice John Roberts, who sided with the Bush administration.
*
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