It is no small irony that as millions were weeping over the death of Pope John Paul II, the great proponent of the culture of life, a man walked out of an American courthouse in Litchfield, Conn., to the rapturous applause of his community after he to all intents and purposes beat the rap on assisted suicide charges. On April 7, Huntington Williams received barely a slap on the wrist for having helped his cancer-stricken neighbor John T. Welles shoot himself in the face. A press photograph shows Williams waving to his cheering supporters on the courthouse steps as he holds a picture of Welles, of whom he was apparently quite fond.

The case, when it first erupted, caused such a ruckus in Connecticut that its legislature drafted a bill that would allow for special probation in cases such as this. The legislature needn’t bother to pass it; the judge found a way to let Williams off scot-free even without the new law. According to a news report, the courthouse was packed with local folks who had taken his side – a factor the judge took into account in sentencing Williams so lightly. The judge also, to use his own words, “split a few legal hairs” and reasoned that Williams had not actually caused Welles’s death, since Welles “had already decided that for himself.” Apparently, the overt actions taken by Williams, which included cleaning Welles’s gun, carrying it into the yard for him (he was too weak to do so himself) and telling him to aim toward the back of his skull to assure certain death, were not sufficient under the Connecticut law to warrant a conviction. Indeed, the judge appeared to sympathize with Williams, commenting that he was glad he wasn’t put in the position that Williams found himself in that day, when Welles asked for his help. The general consensus in the courtroom seemed to be that Williams was a hero for not standing in Welles’s way of exercising his right to kill himself, and indeed, for giving him a helping hand.

By practically exonerating Williams, Judge Brunetti sends a message that in the United States today, the greatest love, the greatest compassion that we can offer to our neighbors who are sick and dying, is to help them shoot themselves and die alone in their backyards, their bodies racked with the pain of cancer, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head. Brace yourselves: There will be many more deaths like this, and not all of them voluntary. Once emboldened, who is stop the Huntington Williams of the world, freelancers in the art of death, who happen to have annoying and aged parents or disabled spouses and children?

Assisted suicide prosecutions have been relatively rare. But those with long memories for such cases in New York will recall George Delury. In 1995, he mixed a cocktail containing a drug overdose for his wife, Myrna Lebov, who was sick with multiple sclerosis and required around-the-clock care. When charged with manslaughter, he pled not guilty to a lesser charge, insisting he helped kill her at her insistence. Public outcry over her “right to die” and Delury’s sob story worked their magic and he served only a brief stint in Rikers. As excerpts from his diary, released around the time of his arrest, made clear, Lebov was (at best) highly ambivalent about killing herself. Two years later, Delury revealed that he had lied to the police. The pills, it seems, hadn’t been killing Lebov fast enough and he was afraid her health-care worker would arrive, so he took a plastic bag and suffocated her. He told no one, because he was afraid (rightly so) that he would be charged with homicide rather than manslaughter. This momentous lie casts doubt on everything he earlier had said and written in his diary about Lebov’s death. The Manhattan D.A.’s office, bound by double jeopardy, could do nothing about it.

Unfortunately, we will be seeing more cases like Delury’s and Williams’s in the years to come. This will be especially true if the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of the Oregon “Death With Dignity Law” (the court will hear arguments in the case next fall). Given the culture of death in this country, it is especially important that the Supreme Court put the brakes on assisted suicide in Oregon.

But a larger ideological debate remains to be waged in the legal arena. Throughout the 20th century we decided matters that went to the very heart of human relations – death, birth, adoption, divorce, and marriage – purely by the yardstick of whether or not the result would advance personal autonomy. Now we are reaping the results of this rights-based habit of mind; it has spilled over into how we view virtually everything, from suicide to employment matters, whether the “right” we are claiming actually exists or not. We have come to the point where ordinary people no longer seem capable of separating right from wrong, so enamored have we become of our “rights.” There is something deeply wrong with a nation when we cheer for a man who helps a neighbor with cancer shoot himself in the head.

The Williams probation sentence was handed down just a few weeks after the Terri Schiavo debacle. This demonstrates that even though her case galvanized the country, it will take more than a lot of high talk to reform our rights-based system of law, that has galloped out of control. It is time to inject morality back into the rights equation. This will take time, money, and passion, but it is a battle worth waging in the 21st century.

Ms. Main, an attorney and a former editor at The National Law Journal, writes often on law and society.