Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702

Supreme Court of the United States

1997

Chapter

6

Title

Implied Fundamental Rights

Page

933

Topic

Modern Substantive Due Process:  Privacy, Personhood, and Family

Quick Notes

The State of Washington prohibits causing or aiding a suicide. Glucksberg and the other plaintiffs were in the terminal phase of painful illnesses. Glucksberg argued that the Washington statute denied plaintiffs liberty without due process because they were unable to receive assistance in terminating their lives. He argued that the law is unconstitutional on its face and as applied to competent, terminally ill adults who wish to obtain medication from their doctors that would hasten their deaths.

Glucksberg Argument

o    The ruling in Cruzan that a mentally competent adult has the right to refuse lifesaving medical treatment to hold that a mentally competent adult has the right to take affirmative steps to die.

Rule

o    The right to commit suicide is not a fundamental right protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

o    No fundamental right to commit suicide.

Analysis

o    Whether the ability to commit suicide is a fundamental right?

o    If it is, the Court must determine whether it serves a compelling state interest and that the statute is narrowly tailored to serve that interest.

o    If the ability to commit suicide is not a fundamental right, the statute is presumed constitutional.

o    A person challenging the law would then have to show that there was no conceivable state of facts under which the statute might be rationally related to any legitimate government interest.

Rational Basis:  Rationally related to a legitimate government interest

o    The Constitution also requires, however, that Washington's assisted-suicide ban be rationally related to legitimate government interests.

o    This requirement is unquestionably met here

Rehnquist - Rational Basis Interests

1.     Washington has an "unqualified interest in the preservation of human life."

o    The ban against assisted suicide and euthanasia shores up the notion of limits in human relationships.

2.     Interest in protecting the integrity and ethics of the medical profession.

o    Time honored tradition between healing and harming.

3.     Interest in protecting vulnerable groups - including the poor, the elderly, and disable persons - from abuse, neglect, and mistake.

o    The is a real risk of subtle coercion and undue influence in end-of-life situations.

o    The lives of the terminal ill and elderly must be no less valued than lives of the young and healthy.

4.     Fear in permitting assisted suicide will start it down the path to voluntary and perhaps even involuntary euthanasia.

o    Netherlands allows euthanasia and sees a lot of cases.

Court - Holding

o    Banning assisted suicide does NOT violate the Fourteenth amendment.

Book Name

Constitutional Law : Stone, Seidman, Sunstein, Tushnet.  ISBN:  978-0-7355-7719-0

Issue

o         Whether Washington's prohibition against "causing" or "aiding" a suicide offends the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution?  No.

o         Analysis:  Whether this asserted right has any place in our Nations traditions?  Yes.

Procedure

Appellant

o         United States Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit which ruled that the State of Washington's ban on assisted suicide, as articulated in Wash. Rev. Code § 9A.26.060(1) (1994), was violative of the U.S. Const. amend. XIV

Supreme

o         The Court reversed judgment in favor of petitioners because Washington's ban on assisted suicide was rationally related to a legitimate government interest and did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Facts/Cases

Discussion

Key Phrases

Rules/Laws

Pl -   Washington

Df -   Glucksberg

Description of State Statute

o          A person is guilty of promoting a suicide attempt when he knowingly causes or aids another person to attempt suicide."

o         At the same time, Washington's Natural Death Act, enacted in 1979, states that the "withholding or withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment" at a patient's direction "shall not, for any purpose, constitute a suicide."

Rehnquist

Section I

o         We begin, as we do in all due-process cases, by examining our Nation's history, legal traditions, and practices.

Protection and preservation of ALL human life

o         The States' assisted-suicide bans are not innovations. Rather, they are longstanding expressions of the States' commitment to the protection and preservation of all human life.

Focused on protecting dignity and independence at the end of life

o         Public concern and democratic action are therefore sharply focused on how best to protect dignity and independence at the end of life, with the result that there have been many significant changes in state laws and in the attitudes these laws reflect.

Living Wills

o         Many States, for example, now permit "living wills," surrogate health-care decision making, and the withdrawal or refusal of life-sustaining medical treatment.

Legislators reaffirmed prohibitions on assisting suicide

o         At the same time, however, voters and legislators continue for the most part to reaffirm their States' prohibitions on assisting suicide.

Section II

Substantive-due-process analysis two primary features

1.     First, we have regularly observed that the Due Process Clause specially protects

o    Those fundamental rights and liberties which are, objectively,  "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition, and

o    "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," such that "neither liberty nor justice would exist if they were sacrificed."

2.     Second, we have required in substantive-due-process cases a "careful description" of the asserted fundamental liberty interest.

o    Flores, Cruzan.

                                  i.    Our Nation's history, legal traditions, and practices thus provide the crucial "guideposts for responsible decisionmaking," that direct and restrain our exposition of the Due Process Clause.

Analysis:  Whether this asserted right has any place in our Nations traditions?

o    Here we are confronted with a consistent and almost universal tradition that has long rejected the asserted right, and continues explicitly to reject it today, even for terminally ill, mentally competent adults.

o    To hold for respondents, we would have to reverse centuries of legal doctrine and practice, and strike down the considered policy choice of almost every State.

Respondents contend - Consistent with substantive due process line of cases

o    The liberty interest they assert is consistent with this Court's substantive-due-process line of cases, if not with this Nation's history and practice.

Respondents Point to Casey and Cruzan - General tradition of self-sovereignty

o    Pointing to Casey and Cruzan, respondents read our jurisprudence in this area as reflecting a general tradition of "self-sovereignty," and as teaching that the "liberty" protected by the Due Process Clause includes "basic and intimate exercises of personal autonomy.

Casey

o    "It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.

o    According to respondents,

§  Our liberty jurisprudence, and the broad, individualistic principles it reflects, protects the "liberty of competent, terminally ill adults to make end-of-life decisions free of undue government interference."

Court - Refusing medical treatment CANNOT be transmuted to assisting in committing suicide

o    The right assumed in Cruzan, however, was not simply deduced from abstract concepts of personal autonomy.

o    The decision to commit suicide with the assistance of another may be just as personal and profound as the decision to refuse unwanted medical treatment, but it has never enjoyed similar legal protection.

o    In Cruzan itself, we recognized that most States outlawed assisted suicide--and even more do today--and we certainly gave no intimation that the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment could be somehow transmuted into a right to assistance in committing suicide.

Court - the right to assistance in committing suicide is not a fundamental liberty interest

o    The history of the law's treatment of assisted suicide in this country has been and continues to be one of the rejection of nearly all efforts to permit it.

o    That being the case, our decisions lead us to conclude that the asserted "right" to assistance in committing suicide is not a fundamental liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause.

Rational Basis:  Rationally related to a legitimate government interest

o    The Constitution also requires, however, that Washington's assisted-suicide ban be rationally related to legitimate government interests.

o    This requirement is unquestionably met here

Court - Rational Basis Interests

1.     Washington has an "unqualified interest in the preservation of human life."

o    The ban against assisted suicide and euthanasia shores up the notion of limits in human relationships.

2.     Interest in protecting the integrity and ethics of the medical profession.

o    Time honored tradition between healing and harming.

3.     Interest in protecting vulnerable groups - including the poor, the elderly, and disable persons - from abuse, neglect, and mistake.

o    The is a real risk of subtle coercion and undue influence in end-of-life situations.

o    The lives of the terminal ill and elderly must be no less valued than lives of the young and healthy.

4.     Fear in permitting assisted suicide will start it down the path to voluntary and perhaps even involuntary euthanasia.

o    Netherlands allows euthanasia and sees a lot of cases.

Court - Holding

o    Banning assisted suicide does NOT violate the Fourteenth amendment.

Concurring - Justice OConnor

o    Whether a mentally competent person who is experiencing great suffering has a constitutionally cognizable interest in controlling the circumstances of his or her imminent death.

o    Patient can obtain palliative [to reduce severity] care that hastens their death.

Concurring - Justice Stevens

o    The Court holds that the Washington law is not invalid on its face.

o    However, it might be invalid in certain circumstances.

o    Specifically, it might be invalid with respect to an individual who is not victimized by abuse, who is not suffering from depression, and who makes a rational and voluntary decision to seek assistance in dying.

Concurring - Justice Souter

o    Substantive due process evolves as competing interests evolve.

o    The present case is like the abortion cases.

o    The state has a legitimate interest in discouraging abortion, but the Court has recognized a woman's right to a physician's assistance in obtaining an abortion.

o    The state interest that is dispositive to me is the state's interest in protecting terminally ill patients from involuntary suicide and voluntary and involuntary euthanasia.

o    It is too difficult to draw the line between voluntary and involuntary suicide.

o    For example, family members might pressure a patient because of the high costs of care or simply because they wish to see their loved one's suffering end.

o    Relying on physicians to make this determination is inadequate.

o    Physicians may not know whether a patient is making a knowing and voluntary choice.

o    Also, physicians may not be acting purely objectively.

o    They may act out of compassion or under financial incentives.

o    Glucksberg's proposal to rewrite the law sounds like the law in the Netherlands.

o    However, the evidence regarding the success of the Dutch system is conflicting.

Concurring - Justice Ginsburg

o    Concurs for the same reasons as Justice OConnors

Concurring - Justice Breyer

o    A law regarding the right to die with dignity might be upheld.

o    However, I do not believe that the Court must decide whether this right is fundamental.

o    There is palliative care for a dying person who is suffering from severe pain.

o    If the law prevented such palliative care, the law's impact on serious and unavoidable pain would be more at issue.

Rules

Class Notes