ATLANTA — Georgia’s Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that a law banning advertising for assisted-suicide services is unconstitutional. The law that was struck down Feb. 6 was enacted in 1994 in reaction to Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s assisted suicides of the 1990s. The statute that the Georgia Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional reads: “Any person who publicly advertises, offers or holds himself or herself out as offering that he or she will intentionally and actively assist another person in the commission of suicide and commits any overt act to further that purpose is guilty of felony and, upon conviction thereof, shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years.”
In February 2009, four members of Final Exit Network, an assisted-suicide advocacy group, were arrested for allegedly assisting 58-year-old John Celmer of Cumming, Ga., in killing himself two years after being diagnosed with throat and mouth cancer. Interestingly, court documents quoted his doctor as saying he had made a “remarkable recovery” and was cancer-free at the time of the suicide.
In April 2010, the Final Exit Network defendants pleaded not guilty to charges of assisted suicide. The defendants later moved to dismiss the indictment on grounds that the Georgia statute on assisted suicide is unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The law violated the right to free speech, they argued, because Georgia law does not prohibit all assisted suicides, only those in which assistance had been publicly advertised or promoted.
The state Supreme Court, in ruling 7–0 for the defendants, noted that the state could have declared assisted suicide a criminal offense, as most other states have done. Had it done so, the law likely would have been upheld.
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