Florida Man’s Right-to-Die Appeal Fails

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A man dying of AIDS can’t get help from his doctor to commit suicide, the state’s Supreme Court ruled Thursday, reversing a lower court.

The dying man, Charles Hall, was told of the ruling but was too heavily sedated with morphine at his home in Beverly Hills, Fla., to respond, said his attorney, Robert Rivas.

“This is precisely what he did not want to have happen,” Rivas said.

Hall’s attorney had argued that a ban on assisted suicide violated the state Constitution’s privacy clause, and the lower court had ruled that Hall could seek a lethal dose of drugs from his physician.

The high court disagreed, saying: “It is clear that the public policy of this state as expressed by the Legislature is opposed to assisted suicide.”

The justices cited a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared a “logical . . . distinction between the right to refuse medical treatment and assisted suicide,” and said they feared that it would be impossible to avoid abuse of such a right.

The 35-year-old Hall has said he was infected with the AIDS virus from tainted blood during surgery in 1981 after an accident. The former restaurant worker’s AIDS was diagnosed in August 1993.

He was one of three terminally ill patients who sued the state for the right to physician-assisted suicide. The other two have died.

“Why not just let me die in peace?” he said in May after listening to attorneys’ arguments in his wheelchair in the state Supreme Court chamber.

“When his pain becomes unbearable, which one of us on this court will be at his bedside telling him to be brave and bear it?” state Supreme Court Justice Gerald Kogan said in a dissenting opinion Thursday.