The debate regarding whether or not assisted suicide should be legal in the United States has been a long, strenuous and very delicate one. Some states – like Oregon and Washington, so far – have agreed to allow assisted suicide, while others denied it and are fighting tooth and nail against it.

In Montana, Judge Dorothy McCarter ruled in favor of making assisted suicide legal in the state. However, all the signs indicate that the decision may be appealed. Judge McCarter ruled in favor of assisted suicide on Friday. The case that received the ruling involved a man in the terminal stage of cancer who sued the state. Part of Judge McCarter ruling’s reads that “the Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity” give a mentally competent person who is terminally ill the right to “die with dignity.” Moreover, the ruling said that “those patients had the right to obtain self-administered medications to hasten death if they found their suffering to be unbearable and that physicians could prescribe such medication without fear of prosecution.”

However, the state’s defense has argued that the Montana Legislature is the one who should decide whether terminally ill patients should indeed have the right to terminate their lives. Mike McGrath, the state’s attorney general, firmly believes that the state will file an appeal in this case, to overturn the decision that allows patients to opt for assisted suicide. The terminally ill cancer patient, the plaintiff in the case, is Robert Baxter, aged 75. In a statement issued by him, Robert Baxter claimed that he was “glad to know that the court respects my choice to die with dignity if my situation becomes intolerable.”