Friday in a Montana court, Judge Dorothy McCarter ruled that doctor-assisted suicide was legal in the state, in a case involving a Billings man suffering from terminal cancer who had sued the state.

Her decision stated that a mentally competent person who was terminally ill had the right to get self-administered drugs that rendered them die more quickly if their suffering was impossible to bear anymore.

Moreover, McCarter’s ruling said that physicians were allowed to prescribe the meds without running the risk of being prosecuted.

Nevertheless, the Montana state claimed that the Legislature and not the court should make the decision concerning whether a terminally ill patient should be granted the right to hasten their death, while Mike McGrath, the state’s attorney general, revealed that an appeal would follow the judge’s ruling. McGrath is scheduled to be sworn in as chief justice of the Montana Supreme Court in January 2009.

The plaintiff in the case, 75-year-old Robert Baxter, who sued the state with four physicians that treat terminally ill patients and a nonprofit patients' rights group, stated he was happy to learn that the state would let him die with dignity if his pain were to become unbearable.

Judge Dorothy McCarter’s decision made Montana the third state to declare doctor-assisted suicide legal, after Oregon and Washington.

Back in 1997, the United States Supreme Court ruled that terminally ill patients had no constitutional right to doctor-assisted suicide, still they did not take any measures to prevent states from deciding otherwise.