Connecticut: No Appeal in ‘Aid in Dying’ Case

Good news and appropriate headline from the Hartford Courant:

No Appeal in ‘Aid in Dying’ Case

I’d like to think that the editors at the paper used the scare quotes on purpose.  Superior Court Judge Julia Aurigemma consistently framed the term that way in her decision to dismiss the case.  The article gives an indication of why it’s extremely appropriate in covering this case:

The plaintiffs in a lawsuit aimed at making it legal for doctors to help terminally ill patients end their lives will not appeal a judge’s decision to dismiss the case.

Fairfield County physicians Gary Blick and Ronald Levine filed the lawsuit last year asking the court to declare that a state law against assisting suicide would not apply to doctors who prescribed lethal medication to mentally competent, terminally ill patients who asked for it. Doing so would not be suicide, their lawsuit argued, but “aid in dying.”

In response,  Judge Aurigemma used the term “aid in dying” every time she used in her long memorandum dismissing the case.  In essence, Aurigemma ruled that the legislature had visited the issue of physician-assisted suicide a number of times – and had never passed an exemption.  The term ‘aid in dying’ was treated by the judge – rightly – as having no legitimacy, since it was in fact just a substitute term for an issue the legislature had already visited under a more established name.

More from the article:

In a statement Thursday, Kathryn Tucker, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said the decision not to appeal was based on Connecticut’s “unusually strict” sovereign immunity laws.

“But the question posed in this case remains,” said Tucker, legal director of Compassion & Choices, a national end-of-life-care advocacy group that backed the lawsuit. “It is essential for Connecticut physicians to know whether providing aid in dying subjects them to criminal prosecution. At present, patients are unsure if they will be able to access aid in dying should they confront an unbearable dying process.”

A couple of things on this ‘spin’ from the organization I tend to think of as “Conflation & Con Jobs”:

I doubt that Connecticut is “unusually strict” when it comes to sovereign immunity.  Most states have measures of immunity in place.  My guess is that they wrote this off since pretty much every argument they made was written off – including their attempt at a judicial sanction of “aid in dying” as a legitimate and distinct type of medical “care.”

C&C attorney Kathryn Tucker says it’s “essential” for physicians and patients to know if handing out lethal prescriptions to patients for the purpose of suicide will subject them to prosecution.  This is pure posturing on Tucker’s part.  The court gave her the answer to that question – physicians can be prosecuted in those circumstances.

Get real.  Not liking the answer is NOT the same as “not knowing.”  –Stephen Drake