"A patient must be mentally alert, within six months of death, and a doctor must certify that a patient's decision is not coerced to do a physician-assisted suicide" (Leone, Daniel 42-3). It is also hard to prove that a patient is spiritually alert. They may have been influenced strongly by another person. If they also are experiencing depression, their decision for assisted suicide may be a impulsive choice. Doctor assisted suicide should never be made legal.

             If doctor assisted suicide was legalized, it would be virtually impossible to control. One place where it would be hard to control would be in the court system. "No one knows for sure what the medical world will be like once the legal shackles against assisted suicide are removed, but we can guess" (Leone, Bruno 95). With so many different people, conditions, and cases the courts would not be likely to give each request for death a fair amount of time to investigate. Eighteen years ago, after David Rivilin broke his neck in a swimming accident at age twenty, he decided that he'd had enough and wanted to die. Intellectually unimpaired, but so severely paralyzed he depended on a machine to breathe, the judge granted him his wish. She justified it by saying it would not be an illegal assistance in Rivilin's suicide, it would be the granting of his legal right to refuse medical treatment. When his doctor turned off his respirator he quickly died. Five days before he died, Rivilin said, "I don't want to live an empty life, lying helplessly in a nursing home for another thirty years" (Smith 50). Rather than search for a way to get him out of a nursing home, the court sanctioned his death. With not enough time and people in courts to analyze each individual situation, assisted suicide may slip out of the government's control. Moreover, there are fears that the poor, minorities, and disabled might be more easily encouraged to die rather than receive inadequate health care.