Charges Dropped in AIDS Victim Suicide

Citing evidence problems that once again call into question the quality of work by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, prosecutors Tuesday dropped charges against a man accused of helping his AIDS-stricken lover commit suicide.

The complex ethical and legal questions raised by the case were left unanswered during a brief Municipal Court hearing that brought an end to the six-month-old prosecution of Keith Green. Instead, the focus was on the coroner’s change of mind as to the cause of death of Green’s partner, noted interior designer James Northcutt. That revision led the district attorney’s office to conclude that Northcutt had died by his own hand from a drug overdose--rather than from carbon monoxide poisoning with Green’s help.

Smiling broadly after a judge dismissed an assisted suicide charge that could have sent Green to prison for up to three years, his attorneys blasted the coroner’s office and said they are considering filing a lawsuit alleging misconduct.

“The coroner’s office was not only inept and incompetent, but seemed to act with deliberate recklessness in terms of our client and his civil rights,” said attorney John Duran.

Lydia Bodin, the deputy district attorney who took over the Green case several months ago, brushed aside suggestions of misconduct, but conceded that the coroner’s office “should have gone further” in its initial round of autopsy testing.

“I think everybody acted in good faith,” Bodin said. “Obviously, I wish we had these drug results five months ago.”

Northcutt died Dec. 4 in his carbon-monoxide filled BMW in the garage of the Los Angeles home he shared with Green. According to police reports, Green told authorities that his partner--who was in the later stages of AIDS and previously had attempted suicide--had taken a large quantity of sedatives and then, with Green’s help, run a pool hose from the car’s exhaust pipe to the car window.

Due to inherit a substantial sum from Northcutt’s approximately $2-million estate, Green was arrested on murder charges. In mid-January, prosecutors dropped the murder count, but left in place a felony charge of aiding and abetting a suicide, filed under a rarely used state statute that is more than a century old.

The coroner’s office initially listed Northcutt’s cause of death as carbon monoxide poisoning. But after additional testing, the office amended its findings May 16 to state that Northcutt, 54, had died of the “combined effects” of carbon monoxide and drug intoxication.

The change undercut the prosecution case because Green, 36, had admitted to helping his partner with the exhaust hose but had said Northcutt on his own swallowed 100 sedatives shortly beforehand.

Although the initial police report included that account and investigators found 22 bottles of medication in the home, the coroner’s office did not test for such drugs. Instead, it ran a standard test for the presence of carbon monoxide, alcohol, methamphetamine, cocaine and PCP and found levels of carbon monoxide, according to Craig Harvey, chief of coroner’s investigation for the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner.

Questioning the autopsy, Green’s attorneys had their own tests performed and in April filed court papers stating that high levels of sedatives had been found in Northcutt’s blood samples.

Not only did further testing by the coroner’s office confirm the presence of the sedatives but a May 13 lab memo pointed out that the amount of carbon monoxide in Northcutt’s blood was not enough to be lethal. “Death probably due to the drugs,” states the memo, which Green’s attorneys found in files they subpoenaed from the coroner.

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Green’s attorneys met with Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti on Friday and showed him the note, Duran said.

Bodin said she would have requested additional drug tests even if Green’s attorneys had not pursued the issue. She added that she recommended the charges be dropped and that Garcetti concurred.

Harvey defended the actions of his department, which came under intense criticism in the O.J. Simpson case. Drug testing in the Northcutt case initially was limited, he said, because it appeared Northcutt had died of carbon monoxide poisoning and because there was no indication he had ingested his medication in excess.

The 22 bottles had pills left in them, Harvey said. Moreover, investigators found only a small, partially full bottle of chloral hydrate, the drug Green said Northcutt had taken.

“There’s not really anything that screams at you that there is chloral hydrate in this person,” Harvey said. “We test for what we believe is there.”

Harvey could not explain why carbon monoxide poisoning was initially listed as the cause of death, even though the 45% level found was far below the 80% amount considered lethal, according to the lab note.

As Municipal Judge T. K. Herman noted, Tuesday’s dismissal sidestepped discussion of the thorny issues that underlie assisted suicide.

“It is unfortunate . . . that the issues presented in this case cannot be determined,” Herman said in granting the prosecution’s motion for dismissal.

“Suicide assisted by a nonmedical person is a matter that needs to be decided in this state,” Herman continued. “It . . . opens a Pandora’s box of problems that do not appear in situations where a medical doctor assists in suicide--among those are the matter of motive.”

Two recent federal appeals opinions that are likely to thrust the legal debate over assisted suicide before the U.S. Supreme Court recently concluded that mentally competent, terminally ill adults have a constitutional right to hasten their death with the help of a physician. But the rulings’ implications for assisted suicides involving nonphysicians remain hazy.

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Bodin said that were it not for the evidence problems, her office would not have dropped the charges. “We cannot selectively prosecute, and until the Legislature makes a change in that statute or the courts do something, that statute is on the books.”

Obviously relieved at Tuesday’s court action, Green said that he finally could start grieving for his companion of eight years. “If anything was ever wrong, Jim would just pick up the phone and fix it,” Green said, adding that he has been extremely lonely since Northcutt’s December death.

“A couple of times I kind of lost it,” he said. “It seemed to not have any end. . . . When everybody is trying to say you did something awful and you know you didn’t.”

Asked if he would take the same action again, Green declined to answer.