Court Orders Kevorkian Murder Charges Revived : Death: Appellate panel says no constitutional right to suicide exists. But it throws out state’s ban on assisting with deaths, citing technical grounds.

The Michigan Court of Appeals ruled 2 to 1 Tuesday that there is no constitutional right to suicide in that state, and it ordered two dismissed murder charges against assisted-suicide crusader Jack Kevorkian reinstated.

At the same time, the court struck down Michigan’s ban on assisted suicides on technical grounds. Under the state constitution, the ban should have been a separate bill rather than part of a measure creating a commission on death and dying, the court said.

The effect of the three rulings was to send proponents of the ban back to the drawing board to draft a new version, while dealing a setback to Kevorkian and his allies on the broader issue of whether suicide is constitutionally protected.

“We’re very unhappy,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Superficially, it may look like we won because this strikes down the law. But the court went way beyond that to rule on the substantive issue, and we may have to appeal.”

The ruling also increases the chances that the Supreme Court will ultimately hear the case because a federal judge in Washington proclaimed last week that there is a constitutional right to decide when to die.

At least 30 states bar helping with a suicide, but lawmakers and judges in Michigan have been forced to pay particular attention to the issue by the activities of Kevorkian, 65, a retired pathologist who lives in a Detroit suburb and has been present at 20 suicides since 1990, five since the ban took effect last year.

In the first jury test of Michigan’s ban, Kevorkian was acquitted last week by a panel whose members said they believed that he intended only to help ease the suffering of a 30-year-old former landscaper and construction worker with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Last August, Kevorkian placed a mask over the face of Thomas Hyde and allowed Hyde to begin a flow of deadly carbon monoxide gas.

The appellate ruling means that, although Kevorkian cannot be charged with assisted suicide, he could be tried for murder.

The court reinstated murder charges in the 1991 deaths of Marjorie Wantz, 58, who suffered from pelvic disease, and Sherry Miller, 43, who had multiple sclerosis. The two women died in a remote cabin in Oakland County, north of Detroit.

The reinstatement of the charges, dismissed at the trial court level, was based on a 1920 state high court ruling that a defendant who mixed poison and placed it within reach of his terminally ill wife was guilty of homicide.

Oakland County Prosecutor Richard Thompson said he had no immediate plans to take the cases to trial. “I think that prudence dictates that we would wait for the Michigan Supreme Court to make a final ruling” in the cases, he said.

On the broader issue of constitutional protection for suicide, Michigan Appeals Court Judge Thomas Fitzgerald wrote that the right to commit suicide is not a logical extension of the right to privacy. “Liberty and justice will not cease to exist as a result of this court’s decision,” he said.

Dissenting Judge Donald E. Shelton wrote that the “government may not totally take from us our inherent right to determine not only who we are, but, even more essentially, whether we are.”

Meanwhile, the current legal status of assisted suicide in Michigan remained unclear.

* KEVORKIAN HEARING: Doctor misses a hearing on the revocation of his California medical license. A12