Judging yourself
This is a strong trial that could go well over either way. Even though the state at this point in time does not have a right-to-die statue I believe it should. A doctor that one is seeking help and care from should have no say how he/she (the patient) should die. By definition a doctor is “a person licensed to practice medicine, as a physician, surgeon, dentist, or veterinarian (dictionary. com)”. Nowhere in that description does it explain a person licensed to declare rightful legal euthinization.
Being the daughter of a terminal cancer patient is hard enough. I can’t imagine having the extra stress of monitoring how your mother or father dies in the hospital bed. Having a state law for the right to die statue could save so many more families from extra heartache. After all it plan and simple is your very own life to live and if one wants to die in a certain way; by golly they should be allowed to. Plan and simple the statue involves, shifting the right-to-die laws from granting permission for death to defining hat constitutes causing a premature death.
Thereby allowing choosing timely death will require new thinking within the right-to-die movement. But this second approach is likely to be supported by more people who formerly were undecided about the right-to-die. We all want to avoid premature death for ourselves. And we can support new laws that prohibit helping or causing anyone to die too soon. But this still becomes an issue because everyone has different opinions and views on life death and even health treatments.
Looking on the court side the law against causing premature death specifies safeguards that might be fulfilled in order to prove that the death was timely rather than premature. And because these sateguards are included in the written law, no Judge can exclude such facts and opinions from any subsequent trial. A great example would be the last trial of Jack Kevorkian was lost because the defense could not offer testimony from the patient and the family that death at this time was the best possible alternative.
The Judge ruled that all such facts and opinions were irrelevant. The only question was whether Jack Kevorkian gave a lethal injection. “If Dr. Kevorkian had been charged with causing premature death, he would never have been sent to prison because the death of Thomas Youk” who was dying of ALS”was not premature (Park, Permission)”. The fact that he died a timely death would have been proven by presenting safeguards that were fulfilled in choosing the best time for him to die.
