Word: courtly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...domain of medical expertise. Rather, such questions of life and death seem to us to require the process of detached but passionate investigation, and decision that forms the ideal on which the judicial branch of government was created. Achieving this ideal is our reponsibility and that of the lower court, and is not to be entrusted to any other group purporting to represent the 'morality and conscience of our society,' no matter how highly motivated or impressively constituted...
...woman mentioned above was Karen Ann Quinlan. Her father's well-publicized petition to have her removed from the respirator was heard by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1976. In a landmark decision, the court ruled that doctors and hospital ethics committees, acting in conjunction with family members, had the right to remove patients such as Karen from life-support systems without appeal to the courts...
...courts of Massachusetts saw differently. The following year, in the case of Joseph Saikewicz, a severely mentally retarded patient who was dying of leukemia, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts delegated the courts find authority in the right-to-die decision, and touched off a heated battle between the legal and medical professions...
...lawyers believed such a case, with no patient consent, was a legal matter. It involved one individual taking the life of another, and required the impartial weighing of all the relevant facts to determine what the patient would have wanted, which only a court can accomplish. The relevant facts would include expert medical testimony, the best estimates of the values and beliefs of the patient concerning medical care, and the pain that he would have to endure without knowing...
...Saikewicz decision, written by Justice Paul J. Liacos, the court rejected the conclusion of the Quinlan case. The court said...