738
Stevens, J., concurring in judgments
dying patients in Washington and New York can obtain palliative care, even when doing so would hasten their deaths. The difficulty in defining terminal illness and the risk that a dying patient's request for assistance in ending his or her life might not be truly voluntary justifies the prohibitions on assisted suicide we uphold here.
Justice Stevens, concurring in the judgments.*
The Court ends its opinion with the important observation that our holding today is fully consistent with a continuation of the vigorous debate about the "morality, legality, and practicality of physician-assisted suicide" in a democratic society. Ante, at 735. I write separately to make it clear that there is also room for further debate about the limits that the Constitution places on the power of the States to punish the practice.
I
The morality, legality, and practicality of capital punishment have been the subject of debate for many years. In 1976, this Court upheld the constitutionality of the practice in cases coming to us from Georgia,1 Florida,2 and Texas.3 In those cases we concluded that a State does have the power to place a lesser value on some lives than on others; there is no absolute requirement that a State treat all human life as having an equal right to preservation. Because the state legislatures had sufficiently narrowed the category of lives that the State could terminate, and had enacted special procedures to ensure that the defendant belonged in that limited category, we concluded that the statutes were not unconstitutional on their face. In later cases coming to us from each
*[This opinion applies also to No. 95-1858, Vacco et al. v. Quill et al., post, p. 793.]
1 Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153 (1976).
2 Proffitt v. Florida, 428 U. S. 242 (1976).
3 Jurek v. Texas, 428 U. S. 262 (1976).
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