I argue here that an adjudication of assisted death might follow from viewing it as a compassionate response to one sort of medical failure, rather than as something to be prohibited outright or as something to be established as a standard policy. This would seem to translate, in law, into allowing compassionate and competent medical practice to serve as a defense against a charge of homicide or of assisting a suicide. By assisted death I mean either voluntary, active euthanasia, as now commonly practiced in the Netherlands and as proposed in an unsuccessful referendum in Washington State in 1991, or assisted suicide, in which the patient is provided at his or her request with sufficient medication or other means to end life, with the knowledge that the patient intends to use the medication for that purpose.