Supreme Court of Canada Orders Legalization of Physician Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia Carter v. Canada (Attorney General) 2015 SCC 5
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In February, 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the criminal law to the extent that it prohibits physician assisted suicide and euthanasia in circumstances defined by the Court. However, Carter did not entirely strike down murder and assisted suicide laws. They were invalidated only to the extent that they prevent homicide and assisted suicide by physicians adhering to the Court’s guidelines. Even with legislation - but particularly without it - it is difficult to see how physicians who are parties to homicide and suicide can entirely avoid some uncertainty about the legal status of their actions. While the Carter ruling means that the state cannot prevent qualified patients from obtaining therapeutic homicide and suicide from physicians, it also means that physicians who fail to follow the Carter guidelines can be charged for first or second degree murder, or manslaughter, or administering a noxious substance. In addition, anyone who deliberately participates in or facilitates euthanasia or assisted suicide by “effective referral” or similar means is liable to be charged unless the act is exempted by Carter from prosecution. The Court limited its ruling to the facts of the Carter case, but left open the possibility of further expansion of the law. It is highly likely that the parameters set by the Court in Carter will be expanded stature law or litigation. With respect to physicians who object to euthanasia or assisted suicide for reasons of conscience, the ruling itself is limited to the constitutional validity of the criminal law. The Court explicitly acknowledged that it does not impose a legal duty to provide or participate in the procedures. The Court’s stated that “the Charter rights of patients and physicians will need to be reconciled,” but this is not a warrant for the suppression of freedom of conscience and religion among health care workers. The Charter right of patients clearly established by Carter is a legal right not to be impeded or obstructed by the state in seeking euthanasia and assisted suicide in accordance with the Court’s guidelines from willing physicians. The Charter right of physicians clearly established by Carter is their legal right not to be to impeded or obstructed by the state in providing euthanasia and assisted suicide in accordance with the Court’s guidelines. Any additional rights claims are derived by reading into the ruling what the judges either did not address, or purposefully and expressly left out.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".