Georgia Court Strikes Down Assisted-Suicide Law
The state Supreme Court finds the restrictions were a violation of free speech.
| Posted Monday, Feb. 6, 2012, at 11:12 AM ET
JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP/Getty Images
Georgia's high court on Monday unanimously struck down a state law that restricted assisted suicides, saying that it violated the free speech clauses in both the state and federal constitutions.
The 1994 law doesn't expressly forbid assisted suicide. It does, however, ban people from publicly advertising for it—a restriction put in place, the Associated Press notes, in response to doctors like the late Jack Kevorkian, who sparked the national assisted-suicide debate in the 1990s.
The court’s ruling means that four members of the assisted-suicide ring Final Exit Network charged in connection with the 2008 suicide of a 58-year-old cancer-stricken man will not have to stand trial on felony charges, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The members were arrested in February 2009 after an eight-month investigation by Georgia authorities in which an undercover agent posing as someone seeking to commit suicide infiltrated the group.
The challenge to the law was brought by the indicted members: former president of the group Ted Goodwin, group member Claire Blehr, regional coordinator Nicholas Alec Sheridan, and ex-medical director Lawrence D. Egbert. Egbert was recently touted as “the new face of assisted suicide” by the Washington Post.
