Word: saikewicz
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...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...
Both the courts and the doctors have always had a stake in protecting and preserving people's lives. Their competing claims to being the ultimate guardians of life sparked into conflict over the Saikewicz case. Doctors maintained the case simply involved a medical question, and it would be a dangerous precedent for courts to interfere with doctors' traditional autonomy in such matters. They argued that society has given the medical profession the responsibility of determining the efficacy of treatments and a patient's chances of survival, and thus they must be the ones to make the right-to-die decision...
...Saikewicz decision, written by Justice Paul J. Liacos, the court rejected the conclusion of the Quinlan case. The court said...
...November 28 of last year the Massachusetts Supreme Court concluded that a lower court was correct in ruling that Joseph Saikewicz, a 67-year-old, mentally-retarded man afflicted with leukemia, could not be denied chemotherapy...