Judge allows trial for California’s right-to-die law

A group of doctors challenging California’s right-to-die law for terminally ill patients can try to prove that the law treats some vulnerable patients unfairly by stripping them of legal protections, a judge ruled Friday.

Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office sought to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the doctors could not show that they or their patients would be harmed by the law, because all of its provisions are voluntary. But Riverside County Superior Court Judge Daniel Ottolia said the physicians, backed by the Life Legal Defense Foundation, had presented arguments that, if substantiated, could show the law is unconstitutional.

The law took effect a year ago after Ottolia denied a request by the same doctors to block its enforcement. Under the statute, if two doctors have determined that a patient will die within six months and is mentally competent to choose death, a physician will prescribe lethal medication that the patient will self-administer.

Similar laws are in effect in Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana.

Doctors seeking to overturn the law contend it lacks safeguards and can be exploited by greedy relatives.

“It’s a very arbitrary decision to determine that someone has six months to live,” the doctors’ attorney, Stephen Larson, said in an interview after the hearing. “A competent physician can determine it within two, three weeks of death,” at most, he said.

As a result, he said, patients wrongly diagnosed as terminally ill will be denied protections of state laws against elder abuse, medical malpractice and other measures. The California law was “very poorly drafted,” Larson said.

Attorney John Kappos of Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit that sponsored the state law, disputed those arguments.

“No one is compelled to engage in aid in dying,” Kappos said. “On the patient’s side and on the physician’s side, it’s completely elected.” He said the abuses alleged by the opposing group of physicians had never been documented in Oregon, where the law has been in effect for 20 years.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko