Montana Court to Rule on Assisted Suicide Case

HELENA, Mont. — Robert Baxter was by all accounts a tough man. Even in the end, last year, as lymphocytic leukemia was killing him, Mr. Baxter, a 76-year-old retired truck driver from Billings, Mont., fought on. But by then he was struggling not for life, but for the right to die with help from his doctor.

Anthony Johnstone, the Montana state solicitor, and Jennifer Anders will defend homicide statutes that prohibit physician-assisted death in a case brought on behalf of Robert Baxter.

“He yearned for death,” his daughter, Roberta King, said in a court affidavit describing her father’s final agonized months.

Now, in death, Mr. Baxter is at the center of a right-to-die debate that could make Montana the first state in the country to declare that medical aid in dying is a protected right under a state constitution.

The state’s highest court on Wednesday will take up Mr. Baxter’s claim that a doctor’s refusal to help him die violated his rights under Montana’s Constitution — and lawyers on both sides say the chances are good that he will prevail.

Washington and Oregon allow physicians to help terminally ill people hasten their deaths, but in those states the laws were approved by voters in statewide referendums, and neither state’s highest court has examined the issue of a constitutional right to die.

In Montana, the question will be decided by the seven-member State Supreme Court. A lower-court judge ruled in Mr. Baxter’s favor last December — on the very day Mr. Baxter died — and the State of Montana appealed the ruling.

The legal foundation for both sides is a free-spirited, libertarian-tinctured State Constitution written in 1972 at the height of a privacy-rights movement that swept through this part of the West in the aftermath of the 1960s. Echoes of a righteous era are reflected in language about keeping government at bay and maintaining individual autonomy and dignity.

“The dignity of the human being is inviolable,” the drafters declared.

Lawyers on both sides say the Montana Supreme Court has a tradition of interpreting the State Constitution with that sentiment in mind, with privacy rights and personal liberty often outweighing other concerns.