Word: circuiter
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Suddenly doctors are talking about little else. In a decision that took legal scholars and medical ethicists by surprise last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a New York State law that prohibited physicians from helping their patients die. It's already legal for doctors to withhold or withdraw treatment at a patient's request. Now, as long as a patient is in the final stages of a terminal disease, mentally competent and able to take a lethal dose of medicine on his or her own, the state can't bar a doctor from prescribing that dose...
Taken alone, the three-judge panel's decision would be important enough, but it comes after a similar ruling last month by the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco, also one of the nation's most influential appeals courts. Unless the Supreme Court reverses both decisions--and there's no guarantee it will even hear the cases--the laws against physician-assisted suicide now on the books in a majority of states may be on their way out. "In the past 30 days there have been more developments in this field than there have been in the previous 20 years...
...depths of the Constitution to find the "right" to physician-assisted suicide--a right unfindable for 200 years--deny the possibility of such a nightmare scenario. Psychological pressure on the elderly and infirm to take drugs to hasten death? Why, "there should be none," breezily decrees the Second Circuit Court of Appeals...
Judge Roger Miner, writing for the Second Circuit, uncomprehendingly admits the reality of the nightmare: "It seems clear that some physicians [in the Netherlands] practice nonvoluntary euthanasia, although it is not legal to do so." Well, why would such things occur in the Netherlands? Are the people there morally inferior to Americans? Are the doctors somehow crueler and more uncaring...
...bombing, the locus of that bitter and confounding episode is shifting to the eventual trial scene in Denver. Since federal courts don't ordinarily permit cameras, some families of the victims who won't be making the almost 600-mile trip from Oklahoma City are petitioning for special closed-circuit coverage. The defendants, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were moved last month from Oklahoma to a medium-security prison about 16 miles from the Denver courthouse. McVeigh told TIME that he prefers the new accommodations...