Man Acquitted of Abetting Ill Wife’s Suicide

An elderly California man who said he only helped his terminally ill wife commit suicide was acquitted of murder charges Friday in a case that right-to-die proponents said should send a message to prosecutors and lawmakers.

“I knew in my heart what I did was right,” said Bertram R. Harper, 73, after the verdict. “But whether the law would see it that way, I didn’t know.”

Harper, his 69-year-old wife, Virginia, and her 40-year-old daughter, Shanda McGrew, traveled from Loomis, Calif., to Michigan last August because they believed assisted suicide was legal in Michigan. Harper admitted helping his wife asphyxiate herself, but prosecutors contended that he had “crossed the line” from assisting his wife to murdering her.

Harper choked back tears when the jury forewoman read the verdict, reached after less than two hours of deliberation Thursday and Friday.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” said Hugh M. Davis, one of Harper’s attorneys, after the trial. He called the acquittal “a triumph of the family and a triumph of love.”

McGrew called the verdict “the happiest moment of my life. I just feel like he’s been vindicated, and my mother can rest in peace now,” she said.

Both defense attorneys and the prosecutor portrayed the case as extending into a legal frontier, the controversial right-to-die issue, which lawmakers in several states are grappling with.

Derek Humphry, executive director of the pro-euthanasia Hemlock Society, said the verdict “sends a message to prosecutors that they’re not going to get a conviction with this type of offense. The jury ignores the law and brings in a moral verdict.”

Prosecutors had charged Harper with second-degree murder, on the grounds that he had intentionally contributed to the death of another. If he had been convicted, he could have faced up to life in prison.

During the trial, Harper admitted that he had pulled a plastic bag over his wife’s face after she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and fallen asleep. He and McGrew both testified that Virginia Harper, who had liver cancer, first had pulled the bag over her own head. They said they lifted the bag up several times, however, after she became uncomfortably warm. He said he made the decision to pull the bag over her face the final time.

Dean Glossop, one of the 12 jurors, said they disregarded testimony by the Wayne County deputy chief medical examiner that Virginia Harper had died of asphyxiation and not an overdose of sleeping pills.

“In our opinion her death was caused by a combination of the tranquilizers which she took and the bag over her head,” he said. “If she had not been under the tranquilizers, she would not have died.”

Since she voluntarily took the sleeping pills and planned her death, the jury felt, her death was not a murder, he said.

Leonard Hicks, another juror, said his mind had been made up before he left the jury box. “I did put myself in his shoes, and I think eight of the other jurors did, too,” he said. The jury’s initial vote had been 8 to 4 for acquittal.

McGrew said she began to fear for her stepfather when the jury twice asked the judge to give them a definition of second-degree murder. “I was absolutely certain they were going to come back with a guilty verdict,” she said. “It was just a surprise to me.”

The Oregon-based Hemlock Society is backing initiatives in several Western states that would make it legal for a physician to administer death-causing drugs to terminally ill patients who wish to die. Washington state voters will consider the issue in a referendum Nov. 5.

In California, right-to-die proponents will begin gathering signatures in October in hopes of getting the issue on the ballot next year, Humphry said. Legislation also has been introduced on the issue in Oregon.

“We’re not going to legitimize the Harper act,” said Humphry, who testified in the California man’s behalf and set up a defense fund that paid half of his attorneys’ fees. “With this (physician-assisted suicide) there would be no need for the Harper act,” he added.

Harper said after the trial that he now will work to help get the issue on the ballot in California “so other people won’t have to go through this sort of situation.”

Unlike many states, there is no Michigan law forbidding assisting a suicide. As a result, murder charges were dismissed last year against a retired Detroit-area physician who assisted in the suicide of an Oregon woman. A bill has been introduced in the Michigan Legislature since then that would make it illegal to assist in a suicide.

Glossop said: “I don’t think you’re going to find another case like this. You’re talking about a storybook marriage that is hard to believe. It was almost too good to be true.”

Defense attorneys had portrayed the Harpers as an unusually loving family. In closing arguments, attorney Otis Culpepper said Virginia Harper “only wanted one thing to happen and that was that she would not suffer and that she would leave the Earth on the night that she had designated,” he said.

“Though it may have been (Bertram) Harper’s hands that flipped that veil down (over her head), they were only carrying out the will of Virginia Harper,” he said. “He was only doing what she wanted done . . . . If she could have (done it), she would have,” he said.

Acknowledging the love that the family felt for one other and that Bertram Harper is a “likable” man, Wayne County assistant prosecutor Timothy Kenny said nevertheless that sympathy and compassion had nothing to do with the legal question at hand.

Before the trial began, prosecutors had offered to let Harper plead guilty to manslaughter and be granted probation and community service that could have been served in California.

On Friday, Harper said he turned it down because “as far as I was concerned I had not committed a crime. I was not going to plead guilty to something I hadn’t done.”

Asked if he would do the same thing again, knowing that he would have to endure a nine-month legal ordeal, Harper said: “If it meant ending my wife’s suffering--yes.”