Here is a link to a report from ADF International about an important ruling from the European Court of Human Rights. “In a major case on the right to life, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of Tom Mortier, son of Godelieva de Troyer, who died by lethal injection in 2012, aged […]
Category: Court Cases
Here is a link to a Reuters story on the oral argument before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. The Court is considering whether there is a state constitutional right to assisted suicide. In 1997, the US Supreme Court rejected a federal constitutional challenge to laws banning assisted suicide.
Here is a link to the June 30, 2016 decision by the New Mexico Supreme Court upholding the state’s ban on assisted suicide. A trial court judge in New Mexico had found the law unconstitutional. By a divided vote, the court of appeals reversed and the New Mexico Supreme Court has now also rejected the trial judge’s decision. […]
Here are a couple of articles on today’s decision from the Supreme Court of Canada invalidating laws banning physician assisted suicide. The Court overruled its earlier decision in the Rodriguez case, which had rejected a constitutional challenge to such laws. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-canadas-top-court-rules-doctors-can-help-kill-patients Canada Strikes Down Ban on Assisted Suicide, Says it Violates the Right to Life […]
Here is a LifeNews.com story about a decision from the British Columbia Supreme Court holding a ban on assisted suicide unconstitutional. http://www.lifenews.com/2012/06/15/canadas-assisted-suicide-ban-struck-down-in-court/ Here’s critical commentary from Wesley Smith. http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2012/06/15/bc-judge-creates-right-to-suicide/ Richard M.
The issue of assisted suicide seemed to have been settled in Canada in 1993 by the Supreme Court decision in the case of Sue Rodriguez. In a five to four decision the Court ruled that the state’s obligation to protect the vulnerable outweighed the rights of individuals to self-determination. Now two new cases, one from British Columbia […]
SSRN has posted a new article, Justins v. the Queen: Assisted Suicide, Juries and the Discretion to Prosecute examining an Australian case and arguing that prosecutors should very rarely charge defendants in cases of assisted suicide. The author notes that the British Crown Prosecution Service has developed guidelines for prosecutors regarding such charges. The guidelines […]
Here is a link to a story in the National Right to Life News about an important case in England. The British take on the case can be found here. The Bland case (1993) authorized English courts to allow the withdrawal of artifically provided food and water from patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). […]
On the European Life Network blog, Pat Buckley has an interesting post about a case in India that raises some of the same issues presented in the Terri Schiavo case. http://europeanlifenetwork.blogspot.com/2011/02/could-this-be-indias-terry-schiavo-case.html The case involves Aruna Shanbaug who has been seriously disabled since 1973. One interesting twist is that the effort to have Ms. Shanbaug’s feeding halted comes from a […]
I highly recommend Bob Destro’s article on the Terri Schiavo case. “Learning Neuroscience the Hard Way: The Terri Schiavo Case and the Ethics of Effective Representatation,” at 78 Miss. L. J. 833-903 (2009). There have been scores of articles on various aspects of the Schiavo controversy. (My own short paper on the Schiavo case is […]