Cite as: 521 U. S. 702 (1997)
Souter, J., concurring in judgment
as respondents here 1 continue to request declaratory and injunctive relief for their own benefit in discharging their obligations to other dying patients who request their help.2 See, e. g., Southern Pacific Terminal Co. v. ICC, 219 U. S. 498, 515 (1911) (question was capable of repetition yet evading review). The case reaches us on an order granting summary judgment, and we must take as true the undisputed allegations that each of the patients was mentally competent and terminally ill, and that each made a knowing and voluntary choice to ask a doctor to prescribe "medications . . . to be self-administered for the purpose of hastening . . . death." Complaint ¶ 2.3. The State does not dispute that each faced a passage to death more agonizing both mentally and physically, and more protracted over time, than death by suicide with a physician's help, or that each would have chosen such a suicide for the sake of personal dignity, apart even from relief from pain. Each doctor in this case claims to encounter patients like the original plaintiffs who have died, that is, mentally competent, terminally ill, and seeking medical help in "the voluntary self-termination of life." Id., ¶¶ 2.52.8. While there may be no unanimity on the physician's professional obligation in such circumstances, I accept here respondents' representation that providing such patients with prescriptions for drugs that go beyond pain relief to hasten death would, in these circumstances, be consistent with standards of medical practice. Hence, I take it to be true, as respondents say, that the Washington statute prevents the exercise of a physician's "best professional judgment to prescribe medications to [such] patients in dosages that would enable them to act to hasten their own deaths." Id., ¶ 2.6; see also App. 35-37, 49-51, 55-57, 73-75.
1 A nonprofit corporation known as Compassion in Dying was also a plaintiff and appellee below but is not a party in this Court.
2 As I will indicate in some detail below, I see the challenge to the statute not as facial but as-applied, and I understand it to be in narrower terms than those accepted by the Court.
753
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