Alaska Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects Assisted Suicide.(Brief Article)

On September 21, 2001, the Alaska Supreme Court unanimously ruled that there is no state constitutional right to assistance in suicide. The justices joined the highest courts of Florida and Michigan in declining to find such a right in their respective state constitutions. In 1997 the United States Supreme Court unanimously concluded there was no right to assisted suicide in the U.S. Constitution.

NRLC General Counsel James Bopp, Jr., who is president of the National Legal Center for the Medically Dependent & Disabled, which filed a friend of the court brief in the case, said, "This decision drives a stake close to the heart of the movement to legalize euthanasia through the courts."

The proponents of legalized assisted suicide "had a two-pronged strategy of bringing cases in both federal and state courts, claiming that assisted suicide bans violate both the United States and state constitutions," said Bopp. "They've now lost every case they've brought in both arenas."

The Alaska high court found "persuasive" the argument "that public policy considerations of assisted suicide must include a recognition that our society is one that, despite legal and social declarations to the contrary, frequently judges others on the basis of physical and mental disabilities, race, ethnicity, social-standing, and other factors unacceptable in life-valuing decision-making."

The court quoted with approval the influential report issued by the 1994 New York State Task Force on Life and the Law:

"[I]t must be recognized that assisted suicide and euthanasia will be practiced through the prism of social inequality and prejudice that characterizes the delivery of services in all segments of society, including health care. Those who will be most vulnerable to abuse, error, or indifference are the poor, minorities, and those who are least educated and least empowered...."

The case began in 1998 when Janice Kastella and Kevin Sampson, both terminally ill, filed suit. asking that their doctors be exempted from the state's manslaughter statute that prohibits anyone from intentionally aiding another to commit suicide. A superior court judge rejected their argument and the plaintiffs appealed to the state Supreme Court. Kastella and Sampson claimed that an exception for physicians to the ban on assisting suicide would not interfere with the state's interest in protecting life, a notion the court swiftly rejected.