From the Huffington Post:
A Montana judge has ruled that doctor-assisted suicides are legal in the state, a decision likely to be appealed as the state argues that the Legislature, not the court, should decide whether terminally ill patients have the right to take their own life.
Judge Dorothy McCarter issued the ruling late Friday in the case of a Billings man with terminal cancer, who had sued the state with four physicians that treat terminally ill patients and a nonprofit patients' rights group.
"The Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity, taken together, encompass the right of a competent terminally (ill) patient to die with dignity," McCarter said in the ruling.
It also said that those patients had the right to obtain self-administered medications to hasten death if they find their suffering to be unbearable, and that physicians can prescribe such medication without fear of prosecution.
"The patient's right to die with dignity includes protection of the patient's physician from liability under the state's homicide statutes," the judge wrote.
Attorney General Mike McGrath said Saturday that attorneys in his office would discuss the ruling next week and expected the state will appeal the ruling.
"It's a major constitutional issue and the Supreme Court should rule on it," said McGrath, who will be sworn in as chief justice of the Montana Supreme Court in January.
I want to put myself down on the side of those who believe that individual rights should not be subject to majority rule. This is what the courts are for and why judicial activism is perfectly justified when necessary.
