Continued Questions Regarding Washington’s Assisted Suicide Act

The King County Bar Association has received a number of responses concerning Margaret Dore’s article entitled Death With Dignity: What Do We Tell Our Clients?, Wash. State Bar News, July 2009 (see prior post for a discussion of the article).  The responses appear on the bar association’s Letters to the Editor page and include the following remarks:

I agree with Margaret Dore’s article criticizing Washington’s new Death with Dignity Act. Her analysis is correct that while the law is promoted as providing “choice,” the reality is something else.

Sadly, Ms. Dore’s analysis is accurate. The strategic vagueness of the language in the statute has been largely ignored. With no requirement that the death be witnessed, or that the patient himself/herself administer the lethal dose, or even that the patient be competent at the time of ingesting the lethal dose, the dignified death promised by the statute’s title may be anything but.

Twenty-some years ago, my doctors believed that I did not have long to live. I also wanted to die. . . . If your new act had been in place, I would have been a victim of “aid-in-dying” and would not be writing you now.

See Letters to the Editor, King County Bar Association, July 2009.