What states is it legal for euthanasia?

Answer 1

None, it's illegal in all states because Dr. Kavorkian (I think that's how it's spelled) from a decade or two ago was arrested for helping ppl commit euthanasia. They had a court case and later illegalized euthanasia.

Another View: WRONG! Physician assisted suicide is lawful in the states of Oregon, Washington, and Montana.

North Carolina, Utah, Wyoming have abolished the common law of crimes and do not have statutes criminalizing assisted suicide:

Ohio's supreme court ruled that assisted suicide is not a crime.

In Virginia, there is no real clear case law on assisted suicide , nor is there is a statute criminalizing the act, although there is a statute which imposes civil sanctions on persons assisting in a suicide.

See below link:

Answer 2

According to Wikipedia, Oregon and Washington, which makes for a rather inconveniently long commute, or a corny Lifetime network movie.

A key turning point in the debate over voluntary euthanasia (and physician assisted dying), at least in the United States, was the public furor over the case of Karen Ann Quinlan. The Quinlan case paved the way for legal protection of voluntary passive euthanasia. In 1977, California legalized living wills and other states soon followed suit.

In 1980 the Hemlock Society USA was founded in Santa Monica by Derek Humphry. It was the first group in America to provide information to the terminally ill in case they wanted a hastened death. Hemlock also campaigned and partially financed drives to reform the law. In 2003 Hemlock was merged with End of Life Choices, which changed its name to Compassion and Choices.

In 1990, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a Michigan physician, became infamous for encouraging and assisting people in committing suicide which resulted in a Michigan law against the practice in 1992. Kevorkian was tried and convicted in 1999 for a murder displayed on television. Also in 1990, the Supreme Court approved the use of non-aggressive euthanasia.

In 1994, Oregon voters approved the Death with Dignity Act, permitting doctors to assist terminal patients with six months or less to live to end their lives. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed such laws in 1997. The Bush administration failed in its attempt to use drug law to stop Oregon in 2001, in the case Gonzales v. Oregon. In 1999, non-aggressive euthanasia was permitted in Texas.

Most recently, amid U.S. government roadblocks and controversy in the Terri Schiavo case, where a Floridian who was in a vegetative state since 1990, had her feeding tube removed in 2005. Her husband had won the right to take her off life support, which he claimed she would want but was difficult to confirm as she had no living will and the rest of her family claimed otherwise.

In November 2008, Washington Initiative 1000 made Washington the second U.S. state to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

In the United States, suicide has never been punished as a crime nor penalized by property forfeiture or ignominious burial. Historically, various states listed the act as a felony, but all were reluctant to enforce it. By 1963, six states still considered attempted suicide a crime (North and South Dakota, Washington, New Jersey, Nevada, and Oklahoma that repealed its law in 1976). By the early 1990s only two US states still listed suicide as a crime, and these have since removed that classification. In some U.S. states, suicide is still considered an unwritten "common law crime," that is, a crime based on the law of old England as stated in Blackstone's Commentaries. (So held the Virginia Supreme Court in Wackwitz v. Roy in 1992.) As a common law crime, suicide can bar recovery for the family of the suicidal person in a lawsuit unless the suicidal person can be proven to have been "of unsound mind." That is, the suicide must be proven to have been an involuntary, not voluntary, act of the victim in order for the family to be awarded money damages by the court. This can occur when the family of the deceased sues the caregiver (perhaps a jail or hospital) for negligence in failing to provide appropriate care. Some legal scholars look at the issue as one of personal liberty. According to Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU, "The idea of government making determinations about how you end your life, forcing you...could be considered cruel and unusual punishment in certain circumstances, and Justice Stevens in a very interesting opinion in a right-to-die [case] raised the analogy."

In many jurisdictions medical facilities are empowered or required to commit anyone whom they believe to be suicidal for evaluation and treatment.

Answer 3

The State of Washington and just recently the State of Oregon.