Husband’s Suicide Aid Was Act of Love, Jury Is Told

A California man who helped his terminally ill wife commit suicide with a plastic bag over her head acted out of love, his attorney said Tuesday.

But prosecutors say the man, Bertram R. Harper, should be convicted of murder because he did more than assist his wife.

“Mrs. Virginia Lee Harper didn’t die at her own hands,” Wayne County assistant prosecutor Timothy Kenny told jurors Tuesday in his opening statement at Harper’s murder trial. “She died at the hands of the defendant.”

Harper, a 73-year-old retired chemical engineer from Loomis, Calif., is facing first-degree murder charges in a trial that is being viewed as a test case by the increasingly vocal pro-euthanasia movement.

Prompted in part by publicity surrounding a Michigan doctor’s so-called “suicide machine,” Harper traveled to the Detroit suburb of Romulus last August with his wife and stepdaughter to help his 69-year-old wife end her life. They went to Michigan, he told authorities, because they thought euthanasia was legal in that state.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist from Royal Oak, Mich., had gained widespread attention last June in a separate case after he allowed a terminally ill Oregon woman to use his device, which administers lethal chemicals. He had not yet been charged with a crime when Virginia Harper died. Subsequent murder charges against him later were dropped, but a court order bars him from ever again assisting in suicides.

In the absence of a state law making it illegal to assist in suicides, prosecutors justified murder charges against Harper by citing a 1920 state Supreme Court decision upholding a guilty verdict against a man who had put poison within reach of his terminally ill wife.

Harper’s attorney, Hugh M. Davis, did not dispute that Harper placed a plastic bag over his wife’s head and secured it with rubber bands. But he said he acted “with no malice” and was only carrying out her wishes.

“An act of love cannot be a crime,” he said. “We will prove that nothing happened here but an act of love.”

A bill that would make it illegal to assist in a suicide cleared the state Senate in March and is before a House committee.