Showdown in Kevorkian Case Seems Near : Suicide: Wayne County official to ask judge to revoke doctor’s bond. He cites continued violations of a state ban.

When the prosecutor here charged Jack Kevorkian in August with violating Michigan’s assisted-suicide ban, he said it was because he believed that the state was moving too slowly in dealing with a crucial issue.

A civil challenge to the temporary law had yet to yield a ruling; the state Commission on Death and Dying had not even started to deal with a permanent solution.

“I had hopes,” recalled Wayne County Prosecuting Atty. John D. O’Hair, that a criminal trial would clarify the matter and that Kevorkian would refrain from helping anyone else end a life until a verdict was returned.

In the case of conviction, O’Hair had decided, he would not seek jail time.

Since then, however, Kevorkian has been present at two more deaths, the latest last week. He involved himself, said his attorney Geoffrey N. Fieger, because the terminally ill people who seek his help are desperate for relief from horrific pain. “He’s not going to sit and wait,” Fieger said. “Don’t underestimate the quality of another person’s suffering.”

And so a showdown appears near, perhaps as early as this week. Despite his personal opinion that terminally ill people should be able to get help to end their lives, O’Hair now thinks that placing Kevorkian in custody is the only way to stop what he calls the “taunting.”

He plans to ask a judge soon to revoke Kevorkian’s bond, unless the prosecutor in neighboring Oakland County, where the most recent death occurred, jails Kevorkian first. He believes he will succeed in convincing the court that there is probable cause, if not outright proof, that Kevorkian should not remain free because he will keep breaking the suicide law.

“We simply cannot let him go on with impunity,” O’Hair said.

The prosecutor has suggested a model law setting conditions for physician-assisted death, and would like to see a statewide referendum on the issue.

“I really think that Jack’s (recent) behavior is so counterproductive to the cause,” O’Hair said in an interview in his downtown office. “The curtain is coming down.”

During the last three years, Kevorkian’s lawyer has managed to defuse such confrontations in Oakland County and another suburb, Macomb County. Three homicide charges have been dismissed; a threatened fourth was never filed.

That approach may get another test. The Oakland County medical examiner decided on Sunday that the death of Merian Frederick, who was suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, was a murder, not a suicide. Oakland County Prosecuting Atty. Richard Thompson said he would not comment until police have finished their investigation.

Frederick, 72, couldn’t hold her own head up, Fieger said. She often stopped breathing. She was nourished through feeding tubes. She was the 19th person whose death was attended by Kevorkian.

Kevorkian, 65, says through his attorney that he will starve himself if imprisoned, until his own death if necessary. “You’re dealing with a man for the ages,” Fieger said.

The man himself seemed relaxed enough Monday in his lawyer’s waiting room, smiling easily and shaking hands firmly, although Fieger would not allow him to be interviewed.

It was Kevorkian, acknowledged O’Hair, who forced him to examine his feelings about the highly charged issue. Even his own mother’s lingering death from cancer had not led him to think the matter through. “It never came up,” he said. “The second before she died, she (still) had hope that the ravages would go away.”

O’Hair sits on the state Commission on Death and Dying, the panel that will provide a recommendation to the Legislature for laws dealing with assisted suicide. The commission and the temporary ban were enacted in direct response to Kevorkian.

In that post, O’Hair began to think about how he would feel if his active life were over and he could “do nothing but think and see and breathe.”

“If there is a merciful God,” he concluded, “he’s not going to condemn me for thinking not only of myself, but of my family.”

With strict guidelines in place, he said, a medical process could stop the lives of those who suffer most.

He doubts, however, that the Legislature will see things his way.

“The Catholic Church and the right-to-life movement will be very powerful on this issue with individual legislators here,” he said. “The success would have to come from a referendum.”

Meantime, the Kevorkian case unfurls. In February, Kevorkian goes to court on allegations that he assisted in the death of 30-year-old Thomas Hyde, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease and was a week away from being placed on feeding tubes.

At a news conference after Hyde died, Kevorkian gave a detailed description of how he supplied Hyde with a canister of carbon monoxide and fitted a mask over the ailing man’s head. Hyde began the deadly flow of gas himself by removing a clip to open a crimp in the tube.

A trial date is expected to be set today on another charge that he helped Donald O’Keefe, 73, in a similar manner, though Kevorkian has been much less specific about his role. O’Keefe’s bone cancer had robbed him of the ability to walk or sit up, Fieger said, and a morphine pump worked in vain to dull his pain.

O’Hair could ask the judge in either case to revoke bond. Though he was still weighing his options on Monday, he said he wants to act quickly, before Kevorkian makes any more announcements of deaths.

Just in case Kevorkian ends up in a Wayne County jail, the sheriff already is wondering whether he could force-feed the prisoner. O’Hair said he would not like to see such intervention if Kevorkian indeed embarks on a hunger strike. “I would simply respect his decision,” he said.

“But it’s pathetic,” he added, “particularly when he has something to offer. His greatest service would be to live and be an advocate. Jack’s very popular now, but when he goes, he’s just going to be a memory.”

Such statements anger Fieger. “He talks out of both sides of his mouth,” he said of O’Hair. Kevorkian, he said, “only cares about the patients. O’Hair is a gnat.”