Dr. Jack Kevorkian

* After these recent days of horror at the Southern California fires and outrage that many of them could have been purposely set, I thought I was too saturated emotionally to find myself seething again. But your coverage (Nov. 6) of Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s being dragged off to jail was just about the last straw.

Here is a physician with enormous compassion and the courage to help human beings, who face nothing but endless physical suffering and hopelessness, who want only to put an end to it, to do so painlessly and with dignity--and he is treated like a common criminal. What should be on trial is not Dr. Kevorkian, but the Michigan law under which he has been charged.

LENORE JACOBI

Malibu

* Death is a natural event that follows birth, as night is a natural event that follows day. If physicians assist the births of babies that didn’t ask to be born, it is even more certain that physicians should assist the deaths of adults who desire to die.

ROBERT Q. CUNNINGHAM

San Marino