Murder Charges Against Kevorkian Dismissed

Murder charges filed against Dr. Jack Kevorkian for helping two chronically ill people commit suicide were dismissed by a judge Tuesday because the state has no law against assisted suicide.

An opponent of assisted suicide said the case should have gone to trial, calling Kevorkian a “medical serial killer.” The prosecutor said that he would appeal.

Some people with intractable pain cannot benefit from treatment, wrote Oakland County Circuit Judge David Breck. “For those patients, whether terminal or not, who have unmanageable pain, physician-assisted suicide remains an alternative,” he said.

Breck dismissed first-degree murder charges in the Oct. 23, 1991, deaths of Sherry Miller and Marjorie Wantz. An earlier first-degree murder charge against Kevorkian, involving an Oregon woman who had Alzheimer’s disease, was dropped in 1990.

Miller, 43, of Roseville, suffered from multiple sclerosis. She used a machine to inject a lethal dose of drugs. Wantz, 58, of Sodus, a victim of chronic pelvic pain, inhaled carbon monoxide.

In addition to finding that Michigan had no law against assisted suicide, Breck said prosecutors had failed to show that Kevorkian actually tripped the devices used by Miller and Wantz.

“This is the way it always should have been,” Kevorkian said at a news conference. “This is a medical service. It always was.”

Oakland County Prosecutor Richard Thompson criticized the ruling as ambiguous and called it “legislating from the bench.”

“This law, if left unchallenged, would make Michigan the only state in our nation that legalized active euthanasia,” Thompson said.

The judge called for a statewide policy on doctor-assisted suicide.

“While the court has found that the physician-assisted suicide in this case is not a crime in Michigan, the prevalence of suicide can be kept to a minimum if doctors can be educated about, and the public be made aware of, the benefits of hospice,” Breck wrote in his ruling. Hospices are facilities for the terminally ill that provide special counseling and painkillers.

In California, voters will decide this fall whether the terminally ill should have the right to seek a doctor’s help to die.