More energy for all their toys. We went through batteries like candy.
Mom!
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The power station's so easy the kids think it's another toy.
Toy?
Me, I think, but it's a piggy bank.
Railback Renewal, reusable alkaline batteries.
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Sending an international fax.
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Sixty minutes of CBS News Weekly Magazine will continue.
When a winery owner gets caught...
Stay out of it, Mrs. Fletcher.
Jessica will solve no crime before it's time.
The last piece of the jigsaw puzzle is missing.
Murder, she wrote.
Then, they were the world's first quints when the government took them away.
I made the decisions here.
And exploited them for millions.
You just keep those quints alive.
Million Dollar Babies tonight.
Frank Sinatra's duet sold over five million and earned him a Grammy.
Now, entertainment's biggest stars join him for the musical event of the year.
Sinatra Duets, Friday.
This is CBS.
They say knowledge leads to power.
And power gets you advancement.
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And comfort gives you joy.
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Right now, it's dessert time at the Thompson's.
For years, pumpkin pie has been their favorite.
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In the All-America City, you're watching KIMA.
In most Western countries, doctor-assisted suicide is illegal.
In this country, Dr. Jack Kivorkian is the driving force to change that law.
In Canada, it's not a doctor, but a patient.
Sue Rodriguez.
She was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, an incurable nerve condition.
The body's muscles shut down.
The result is usually death by suffocation.
She decided she would choose when to die and perhaps change the law in the process.
She allowed Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cameras in to report on that struggle.
It's a remarkable document of a determined woman and the people who fought for a piece of her life.
This fragile woman could not have known what she was getting into when she began her campaign,
with a videotape appealing to the Canadian Parliament to change the law, to make assisted suicide legal.
A year ago when I was first diagnosed, I was quite agile.
Today, I can barely walk.
I want to ask you, gentlemen, if I cannot give consent to my own health,
if I cannot give consent to my own death, whose body is this?
Who owns my life?
Sue Rodriguez, a suburban housewife in Victoria near Vancouver,
was 38 when she was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease.
Doctors told her she had two to five years to live.
Over the next 12 months, she deteriorated rapidly.
Knowing she would not beat the disease, that she would eventually choke to death,
she decided when her condition became intolerable, she would commit suicide.
She also faced the cruelest of ironies.
Oh, God.
I lost the use of my hands and I have a hard time swallowing,
so I couldn't envision swallowing 60 to 80 pills and being successful at it,
so I knew I needed help.
In the summer of 92, Sue met John Hofzis of the Canadian Right to Die Society.
Hello.
He urged her to take her case to court,
to challenge the law that makes assisted suicide a crime.
I am willing to help this woman.
Hofzis also agreed to help her find a doctor to assist in the suicide,
and if he failed to find one, he would help to do it himself.
ALS is a horrible disease to live through, but I do have it and I am going to die.
My intentions are to live as long as possible, to enjoy my son while I can.
Somebody get...
Sue Rodriguez lived alone with her one young son.
She and her husband had separated just before she was diagnosed.
On December 3, 1992, she and the Right to Die Society held a press conference
to announce their challenge to the law.
Hello.
In so doing, she became a symbol.
It became a career and left her exhausted,
left her with even less time for her son.
Life only got more complicated when the legal battle started.
She hired a lawyer, Chris Considine, to make the case in court.
They started rehearsing for the trial.
Would you please tell the court what is your understanding of the progression of your disease?
Of further weakness and muscle loss.
Considine's strategy was, if it's legal for an able-bodied person to commit suicide,
but illegal for a disabled person to ask for help,
then the law is discriminatory and should be struck down.
So your choices without committing suicide are to die of suffocation, aspiration, pneumonia.
Why is it that you don't wish to die by those methods?
I think it's a gruesome and unfair way to go.
And I just feel that I would like to have control of my destiny
and want a better death.
CBC Radio News, British Columbia.
Two pro-life groups will be in a Victoria Court today to oppose a right to die.
When the case went to court, it was showtime for everyone with a stake in Sue Rodriguez's life and death.
Sven Robinson, a politician.
John Hofzis of the Right to Die Society.
The forces against her were powerful.
Lawyers for the government and pro-life groups presented 1500 pages of reasons
why assisted suicide is morally reprehensible.
Ten days later, the ruling came down against Sue Rodriguez.
Her lawyer said they'd appeal.
Less than a month later, by early January 1993, Sue Rodriguez all but lost the ability to feed herself.
She couldn't handle a spoon or a fork.
It was probably just over a period of a few days, not even a week,
where I just couldn't coordinate doing that.
And that was quite a transition for me.
It takes a long time to go through sort of routine daily activities of getting dressed and bathed and fed,
so I've slowed down.
Ironically, living in this twilight zone, fighting for the right to die, gave Sue Rodriguez a strong reason to live.
I believe I was meant to do it. I feel like it's my job.
For John Hofzis, Sue Rodriguez, with her grit and courage, was perfect casting.
She would be his passport to a kind of immortality.
He wrote a newspaper column attacking the opposition, accusing it of compounding her misery, then forged her initials.
The Vancouver Sun printed it.
I signed S.R.
Just as a, you know, well, I mean, otherwise it would just be, I mean, it had to be signed by something, it seemed to me, right?
I mean, it was being submitted in the Voices column, so I just initialed it.
So was Furious.
I want to be the one that gives direct quotes on my behalf for anything written.
But what is coming out is a kind of poignant, almost soap opera story that's repeated over and over still at the present time.
There's no political pressure building to change the law. Everyone is just sort of feeling sorry for you.
That'll make what you're creating, though, is a much bigger job than I ever anticipated to get into.
By now, Sue was struggling with a variety of devices designed to compensate for her loss of muscle control.
While she smiled in public, her life at home had become almost unbearable.
An attempted reconciliation with her husband had failed.
I'm becoming more and more helpless and needy, and that is a hard thing to watch.
But, to a certain degree, it's hard for me to go through what I'm going through, and I wouldn't mind a little support.
But not everyone's capable of doing that.
There it is.
The British Columbia Court of Appeals heard her case.
In March of 1993, Sue Rodriguez and Member of Parliament Sven Robinson waited to hear the Court's ruling.
The decision is as follows. It is a 2-1 decision against us. The Chief Justice is dissenting.
They just basically were all of the opinion that really it is a situation in which Parliament should deal with it.
At a news conference later that morning, Sue and her lawyer announced they would appeal to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court of Canada.
She also let it be known that she'd found a doctor who would help her die, no matter what the court ruled.
But Sue's calm, reflective, even discreet decisions did not fit in with John Hofstes' plans.
He told Canadian reporters that her death would not take place in secret. Everything would be public.
He'd even suggested that the cameras would tape her suicide.
I think that as of today, her thinking has changed completely, and she would be loathe to have a camera recording her death for any reason at this point.
I mean, I don't know whether it's a middle-class squeamishness or something, but part of me was saying, let's prove to the world that she indeed has a good death.
Yeah, it takes stupid little practice.
Sue had since decided her death would be private, and her ashes buried under a fig tree in the garden.
She also decided to cut all ties with John Hofstes and his right-to-die society.
To Hofstes, it was as if she'd taken away his reason for living.
I've never had a career that added up to anything. I've never had a life that added up to anything.
And this, forming the society, was my chance to almost reinvent myself.
It was something, and it was a big something.
And if I lose that, I don't just lose a job.
It's like...
I got you.
By late April 1993, it took all the energy Sue could muster just to make it through a day.
Nerves destroyed by ALS weakened the muscles in her arms so much they couldn't hold the joints together anymore.
Her shoulder was permanently dislocated.
This is capped up here.
Yeah, you moved it.
Life became an endless round of indignities witnessed by strangers, no matter how helpful and kind, strangers nevertheless.
Dying this way is definitely not for sissies.
When they are dying, and we knew that from the beginning, I guess what happens is...
She still hoped the Supreme Court would allow her to die her way legally.
And it's perhaps your way of saying...
Good morning everybody, I'm Don Gimmon.
For the second time in its history, the Supreme Court of Canada is permitting live television coverage while it hears an appeal.
On May 20th, 1993, the Rodriguez case went to the Supreme Court of Canada.
She watched from home.
Mrs. Rodriguez wishes to exert control over the last days of her life, her body, so that she may die with dignity as a terminally ill but able-bodied person is able to do.
Eight different groups, some for and some against, testified.
Killing or assisting in killing is a form of law.
Pro-life groups in the Catholic Church argued that assisted suicide is morally wrong.
And foreign to our historic and theological traditions.
The nine Supreme Court justices heard seven hours of argument, and then announced that a decision would come in four months' time.
To Sue Rodriguez, four months seemed practically a lifetime.
I really feel like I'm ready to go at any time.
I'm just feeling broken down and sore in my arms and head.
I'm still atrophied.
And hopefully my son will feel the aftermath.
That his mom did something.
Yeah, I hope one day when he's older he'll be found.
He will be.
Just before sunrise on the last day of September 1993, a dying woman waits and hopes that 3,000 miles away in Ottawa, nine high court judges will allow her to pass her own sentence of death.
The decision is the appeal is dismissed and it's a 5-4 split.
I want to kiss on that that just one vote decides your fate one way or the other, one person.
You've got four of the highest court judges, including the Chief Justice of Canada on your side, and one other vote goes the other way.
At a news conference later that morning, her disappointment impossible to hide, her voice barely audible, Sue Rodriguez thanked her supporters and urged Parliament to act.
I hope that Parliament will act and allow those who are in my situation the benefit in the future.
After her loss in court, Sue Rodriguez suffered for another four and a half months.
She spent most of her time like this, in bed, alone, drifting in and out of sleep.
At this point, her speech was almost unintelligible. Swallowing and breathing were a constant problem.
This is not fun.
Strong doses of liquid morphine became a steady part of her diet and she announced it was time to die.
In the end, Sue Rodriguez made up her mind to defy the law.
With the help of a doctor whose name she kept secret, she committed suicide on Saturday, February 12th, 1994.
Listen, the stuff that we make, it's powerful. It makes you powerful.
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If you're not satisfied with how they hold up, wear, tear, whatever, Kmart will exchange them or give you a refund. I'm glad something's Kid Proof around here.
Paying for quality can be a difficult decision at first. But over time, it gets a lot easier to live with. Accurate. Some things are worth the price.
It's jingle bells time again, and no one jingles bells better than Andy Rody.
It's still five weeks away, but already you can see Christmas coming. You can always tell when it's getting close because the morning television shows start doing pieces about dangerous toys.
The thing about showing a dangerous toy like that is, after seeing it, every kid in America wants one.
Now that's just not the kind of thing we want our kids to have.
When I was young, they didn't have morning television shows, so we didn't know the toys were dangerous. I could have swallowed a yo-yo or flown off a pogo stick and hurt myself.
All this dangerous toy information is released every year by an outfit called the Institute for Injury Reduction outside Washington.
They've done a good job making the toy industry be more careful about the toys they make, and they've done a good job for themselves, too.
The Institute for Injury Reduction, which held a press conference this week, is supported by members of ATLA, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.
How about the courts? We look to the courts, or we should look to the courts, to be bringing sanctions against manufacturers who injure children through unsafe toys,
through the lawsuits of victims and their families, and more and more not giving adequate awards that will shake up the manufacturers and send them the message that this behavior is unacceptable.
Bringing dangerous toys to everyone's attention is good business for trial lawyers, because when people see that toys can be dangerous, more people decide to sue,
and more juries, who have also seen the dangerous toys on television, are apt to pay them, and the lawyers, of course, big awards.
If there were no toys, no child would ever be hurt by one.
Congressman Newt Gingrich wants more orphanages. Well, in that same Christmas spirit, there are a couple of laws I'd like passed.
Make it illegal for any store to mention giving Christmas presents in an ad until after the Thanksgiving dishes are done.
Second, no more than ten Christmas catalogs could be sent to any one house. After ten, they'd be automatically shredded at the post office.
Third, it would be against the law to use Santa Claus in any display until the first week in December.
And a final bit of Christmas legislation. There are already places selling Christmas trees.
Make it illegal for anyone to cut down a Christmas tree before the end of the first week in December.
The penalty for breaking the law would be they'd have to come and clean the needles off the rug in your living room.
I'm Ed Bradley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.
Imagine a rent-a-car company that will pick you up right at your door. That's Enterprise.
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Life is a series of roadways. If you want to get anywhere, you've got to get off that bench and play, move into that merging lane.
So you check your mirror, but an 18-wheeler with 30 tons of persuasion is saying,
Oh, no, sister, you're not coming in here. Should you go? Stay. You point your big toe to the floor. You go.
Two hundred and seventy five horses in a 32-valve V8 respond.