Booth Gardner Subject of Film Short-Listed by Academy Awards.

Included in the eight Documentary Short Subject films selected as semi-finalists for the 2010 Academy Awards is "The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner." Filmmaker Daniel Junge follows Washington state governor Gardner as he works to make Death with Dignity legal in his state.

via edendale:

The NY Times Magazine profiled Gardner in 2007:

""This will be my last campaign,” Booth Gardner said. “This will be the biggest fight of my career.”...

The campaign he was starting, when I spent time with him this summer and fall, goes by the name of “death with dignity,” and the statewide law he hopes to enact by popular vote on Election Day of 2008 would allow for “physician-assisted suicide” or, as the death-with-dignity movement prefers to call it, “hastened death” or “aid in dying.” The law would let doctors prescribe lethal doses of narcotics to terminally ill patients who ask to end their own lives. It would be modeled closely on a statute in Oregon, the only state where the movement has been successful. In all others, suicide is not illegal, but in nearly all it is a crime to help someone kill himself. (The law in a few states doesn’t address the issue of such assistance, which leaves the one assisting exposed to possible prosecution.) The movement has put measures like Gardner’s directly before voters once already in Washington, in 1991, and in California, Michigan and Maine in the years since, and it has tried several times to turn its vision into law through state legislatures. Some of the failures have been narrow. The referendum in Washington was defeated 54 percent to 46 percent; in Maine 51 percent to 49 percent. With Gardner giving voice to its cause, the movement hopes for momentum."