Supreme Court to hear challenge on assisted suicide

? A Supreme Court filled with an ailing chief justice is wading again into the emotionally charged issue of whether terminally ill patients should be allowed to choose death over life.

Four of the nine justices have had personal experience with life-threatening cancer, including Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 80.

Now, eight years after ruling that states should decide the issue, the same nine justices will consider the Bush administration’s attempt to override Oregon’s unique law allowing physician-assisted suicide.

The decision to review Oregon’s law during the session beginning in October is the latest in a long-running battle over the question of assisted suicide.

The high court sided with states in 1997, but four years later Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft declared that federal drug laws prohibited doctors from prescribing lethal doses. An appeals court rejected that interpretation, and the Bush administration is appealing the decision.

Since the Oregon law took effect in 1997, more than 170 people have used it to end their lives. The law is meant for only extremely sick people, those with incurable diseases who two doctors agree have six months or less to live and are of sound mind.

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, said the Bush administration was trampling on voters’ rights.

“While politics has driven the appeals of the lower court’s decisions on this law, I am confident that now that politics are put aside, the Supreme Court will ultimately side with the rights of Oregonians as citizens of a sovereign state,” he said.

But a physicians’ group that opposes Oregon’s law said it hoped the court would toss out the law on the grounds that giving lethal prescriptions is not a legitimate medical practice.

“We don’t believe that any state should be permitted to unilaterally exempt itself from federal law forbidding the misuse of federally controlled substances to overdose vulnerable patients,” said Dr. Kenneth Stevens, a spokesman for Physicians for Compassionate Care.

In developments at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, the court:¢ Heard arguments in the case of residents of a working-class neighborhood in New London, Conn., trying to keep their homes, which the city wants to take under the power of eminent domain for a private economic development project.¢ Rejected a challenge to its landmark ruling legalizing abortion, sidestepping a highly charged political debate. Without comment, justices declined to hear the appeal from Norma McCorvey, the woman once known as “Jane Roe.”¢ Declined to review the constitutionality of a state law banning the sale of sex toys, rejecting an appeal that said consumers have a right to sexual privacy.¢ Declined to consider a last-ditch appeal by the government seeking to remove U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth from deciding an 8-year-old lawsuit pitting 300,000 American Indian landowners against the Interior Department. The current and former officials claimed Lamberth was biased.