Gotta go, so instead of waiting for your response, here goes:
I said there is no Constitutional right to suicide, you said I was wrong. I said this was not a states right issue, you said it was.
It isn't.
Here is some case history, where a Florida court has ruled that there is a Constitutional right to commit suicide.
Which is lunacy.
I believe this to be the relevant case in re: a Florida state court and two federal Courts
of Appeals recently have misconstrued the Constitution to
``discover'' a constitutionally protected liberty interest in
physician-assisted suicide.
SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT
(1) This Court has consistently held that the guarantee of liberty in article I, section 23 of the Florida Constitution (the "Privacy Amendment") protects an individual's autonomy to control his own body. Never is this right of selfsovereignty more important than when one must choose between sorrowful alternatives about how and when to die.
People often want their deaths to be the final expression of the values they held dear in life, particularly given that their deaths will be the last memory they leave their family. Some people, given a choice, would choose to take control of their deaths, and die at the time of their choosing, with the loved ones of their choosing, while they are still lucid.
The State, instead, forces them to submit to a doctorinduced morphine coma for several days, during which their respiration fails from the drugs or they die from dehydration. While most people may always choose this route, there is no justification for the State to force its citizens to die according to a Stateapproved script.
By prohibiting Mr. Hall from obtaining Dr. McIver's assistance in his death, the State has broken the promise of the Privacy Amendment that there is a realm of personal liberty that the government may not enter without a compelling justification. The trial court therefore correctly found that section 782.08 denies Mr. Hall his right of selfdetermination under the Privacy Amendment.
(2) Moreover, the State takes this action with no justification, given that the State approves of doctors assisting their patients to die by other means, none of which is safer, less subject to abuse, or otherwise superior to the assistance Dr. McIver is offering to Mr. Hall. Because the State did not prove a rational basis to distinguish the Stateapproved modes of physicianassisted death from the mode Mr. Hall seeks from Dr. McIver, section 782.08 also denies Mr. Hall his rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
aclufl.org |
