Right To Die

A Lodi woman pleaded not guilty Friday to charges that she assisted in the suicide of her brother, a blues guitarist who was well-known in the Central Valley. Jimmy Hartley, 45, had been crippled by a series of strokes and other health problems. In constant pain, he had pleaded with his sister for help in killing himself for nearly a year, according to Randy Thomas, June Hartley's attorney.

A looming battle in Washington state over efforts to create a right-to-die law for the terminally ill is a personal one for two men leading it, both of whom are ill. Fighting for the measure is a former governor who wants the freedom to exercise such a right; fighting against it is a former press secretary who can't imagine anyone wanting to. Proponents are wrapping up a petition drive to put Initiative 1000, the proposed Washington Death With Dignity Act, on the November ballot.

"Did any of us actually decide to stop?" Chris still asks, almost two years after her son, Sam, died of cancer at the age of 17. Discontinuing treatment was not an option. Sam had decided he was willing to tolerate as many rounds of cancer drugs as his body could stand. "Nobody knows the future," Chris says. "And nobody has the right to take a kid's hope away."

Calling himself a "Johnny-come-lately" to the issue, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez announced Thursday that he will back a bill to allow terminally ill people to hasten their deaths with lethal prescriptions. Similar bills have failed in the last two years, but supporters say Nunez, a Los Angeles Democrat, could make the difference. "We are more hopeful now than ever that we can get this bill signed into law," said the bill's author, Assemblywoman Patty Berg (D-Eureka).

Backers of a proposal to allow terminally ill Californians to hasten their deaths with lethal drugs pointed Thursday to legalized assisted suicide in Oregon, where a new report shows it is used sparingly. Forty-six Oregon residents, most of them cancer patients, used the law to end their lives in 2006, according to the Oregon Department of Human Services' ninth annual report on the so-called Death with Dignity Act that voters there passed in 1994. That law is unique in the country.

Fourteen months ago, Tom McDonald heard the news no one wants to hear. At 76, he was an active retiree who lived in a comfortable ranch house overlooking Lake Oroville, north of Sacramento, a good-looking man with a luxuriant head of silver hair and an outdoorsman's ruddy, fleshy face. He and his second wife, Dolores, traveled the West Coast in their 28-foot RV, took weekend jaunts to Tahoe, lounged with friends and family on their "party barge." Tom went trout fishing. He invented gadgets.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez announced in February that he was "ready to buck my church" and push legislation allowing terminally ill people to speed up their deaths with lethal drugs. But he wasn't ready for this -- not from holy leaders. The church is bucking back and looking like an ugly old political attack dog. We're seeing a collision of church and state, both of which serve society best -- with all our religious diversity -- when they operate separately. As the nation's founders planned.

Confined to a rusty wheelchair and unable to control her muscles below her neck, Li Yan seemed destined for nothing more than a short life of pain and hopelessness. Instead, the 29-year-old with muscular dystrophy has been catapulted into the center of an ethical debate. Li, fearing that her disease eventually will leave her in a helpless state, used her blog in March to ask the National People's Congress to legalize her right to die.

Despite the efforts of Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, legislation to allow terminally ill people to hasten their deaths was shelved Thursday for lack of support. Certain they didn't have the votes to pass it, the bill's authors in effect killed it, at least until January, by not bringing it up for a vote on the Assembly floor. Nunez, a Los Angeles Democrat, co-wrote the bill, to the consternation of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other Catholic leaders.

Five times in the last dozen years, bills on medically assisted suicide have risen in the California Assembly, and five times they have failed. In every instance, a great deal of the credit for their demise goes to a constituency associated with advancing personal choice and civil rights -- namely, the disability rights movement. The latest attempt, Assembly Bill 374, which its backers called the California Compassionate Choices Act, failed to make it out of committee in June.