The three-judge panel rejected arguments that the residency requirement violates protections in the U.S. Constitution. (Getty Images)
A federal appeals court has rejected a late Delaware woman’s challenge to the residency requirement in New Jersey’s assisted suicide law.
The three-judge U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled Friday that assisted suicide is not a fundamental privilege the state must extend to residents from other states. Striking the residency requirement would expose doctors to criminal prosecution, risk inter-state conflicts, and undermine anti-coercion safeguards in New Jersey’s law, they said.
“A prescription lawful in Camden can be evidence of a felony in Philadelphia,” Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the panel. “If a New Jersey doctor prescribes a Pennsylvanian lethal pills and she swallows them back in Pennsylvania, the doctor might reasonably fear prosecution.”
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In New Jersey, doctors can prescribe self-administered medication to terminally ill New Jersey adults expected to die within six months so they can end their lives.
Before a doctor can prescribe the medication, a patient must make one written request and two oral requests separated by at least 15 days.
The suit was brought initially by Delaware resident Judy Govatos, Philadelphia resident Andrea Sealy, and two New Jersey doctors.
One of the doctors retired during the litigation. Sealy died before a lower court upheld the residency requirement. Govatos, who had late-stage lymphoma, died in November after oral arguments were held in the case, leaving Paul Bryman, a New Jersey doctor, as the case’s only plaintiff.
“I am deeply disappointed by today’s ruling,” Bryman said in a statement. “Terminal patients outside New Jersey should have the option of medical aid in dying without having to travel long distances.”
New Jersey’s Medical Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act, which passed in April 2019, was controversial, with critics raising ethical and religious objections while supporters said people with terminal illnesses deserve to choose when they would die.
Bryman argued the law’s residency requirement violates the U.S. Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause, which requires states to protect the fundamental rights and privileges of out-of-state residents within their borders.
But those protections do not require New Jersey to guarantee all privileges to residents from other states, the court ruled in its precedential opinion. Assisted suicide — a relatively new practice legal in only 12 states and Washington, D.C. — does not qualify as a fundamental right, the judges said.
“There is no longstanding tradition of doctor-assisted suicide. On the contrary, there is a centuries-long tradition against it,” Bibas wrote.
For the same reasons, the law does not violate the Constitution’s equal protections clause, the panel said.
New Jersey’s law “aims to keep both patients and pills in-state” to avoid exposing Garden State doctors to prosecution in other jurisdictions and avoid causing discord with states where assisted suicide is illegal, the court ruled.
Other states also lack laws barring insurers and others from pressuring patients to go take the medication once they have obtained it, which would undermine protections in New Jersey’s law, the court said.
“New Jersey’s justifications are weighty, rooted in real dangers of extending doctor-assisted suicide to nonresidents,” Bibas wrote. “And its response is well tailored to further those justifications.”
The court rejected claims that the law infringes on federal authority over interstate commerce, finding the statute is not commercial in nature.
The Office of the Chief State Medical Examiner reported 409 people died through the program between August 2019 and the end of 2024, including 122 last year.
“Despite this decision, access to medical aid in dying remains a critically important option for all terminally ill people who wish to receive health care in the state of New Jersey,” said Jess Pezley, an attorney with Compassion & Choices, a Colorado-based nonprofit that represented the plaintiffs.
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