Should our criminal law punish voluntary euthanasia in its active and passive forms? Where a terminally ill person voluntarily, intelligently, and knowingly chooses to die with someone's help, the person who knowingly assists the death by active or passive conduct should not necessarily be liable for murder or assisting suicide, i.e., voluntary euthanasia of the terminally ill should be legal under controlled circumstances. Where a terminally ill person voluntarily, intelligently, and knowingly chooses to die with someone's help, the person who knowingly assists the death should be liable for murder, not aiding suicide. Same as the second answer, except that the aider should be liable for aiding (assisting) suicide rather than murder.

KINDLY ANSWER THE FOLLOWING POLL REGARDING  EUTHANASIA

Oregon is the only state where people are allowed to kill themselves with drugs prescribed by a doctor for such purpose. Under the state's voter-approved Death with Dignity Act, a terminally ill patient may take the lethal drugs if two doctors agree that the person has less than six months to live and is mentally competent to decide whether to end his life.

In fact, physicians have been knowingly (aware that their acts are reasonably certain to cause death) hastening the deaths of their patients since antiquity. There is no accurate frequency data, but this could be accumulated easily by doing drug screens on people who die in hospital. I suggest to you that perhaps 60% of the geriatric deaths would display lethal doses of drugs, principally morphine, that are given in IV drips to "alleviate pain." Analytically, these are murders under the common law and law of Texas because they are done knowingly, though not necessarily with intent to kill. See Section 19.02 (b) (1) TPC . There is also a significant amount of low visibility (bootleg) euthanasia in connection with full-blown terminally ill AIDS patients en extremis.