For the Defense of Dr. Death

Once again, the reporters pilgramaged to the Southfield, Mich., law offices of Geoffrey Fieger, the man who keeps Jack Kevorkian out of jail. Once again, on this hot August afternoon, they knew pretty much what to expect. Fieger has called these command press performances with numbing frequency since 1990, when Kevorkian assisted his first suicide, Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old, Portland, Ore., woman with Alzheimer’s disease.

Fieger usually put on a good show, and this day’s promised to be real entertainment. Boston newspapers had just reported that Judith Curren, Kevorkian’s 35th (as of this writing, they number 44) assisted suicide, allegedly had been a victim of domestic abuse and that her medical ailments were neither terminal nor, the medical examiner was suggesting, real. Curren, a 42-year-old nurse from Pembroke, Mass., had been found to have fibromyalgia, a painful muscle disorder, chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndromes. An autopsy showed only that she was obese. The not-so-subtle implication, Fieger said, Curren was done in by Kevorkian and her husband, Franklin.

In the six years since the Adkins assisted suicide, Jack and Geoff, as the Michigan press calls Kevorkian and Fieger, have won acquittals for Kevorkian in three trials resulting from his assisted suicides; had one murder charge against Kevorkian dismissed; challenged successfully a poorly written assisted suicide ban that expired before Kevorkian stood trial for violating it; beat an attempt to prosecute Kevorkian under Michigan common law; and ignored an injunction barring Kevorkian from assisting any more suicides. They have seen their most determined opponent, hard-nosed Oakland County prosecutor Richard Thompson, who ordered two of Kevorkian’s three trials, lose to an underdog in the Republican primary in August. They have celebrated public promises by both of Thompson’s possible replacements not to waste more taxpayers’ money on another Kevorkian trial. The war was won, it seemed. Until Judith Curren.

Fieger, broad-shouldered and bronzed, strode into his law office library and lowered his 6-foot-2, 225-pound former lineman’s body into a chair. He looked up, his blue eyes adorned by daddy-longlegs eyelashes, smiled his perfect, pearl white smile and began a minutes-long monologue.

“Thank you all for coming. I wanna go over Judy Curren’s physical health and her desire to end her pain and suffering after nearly 20 years of horrendous pain and agony.” Fieger blasted the Boston newspapers, released letters Curren had written to Kevorkian, begging for help. He ripped Oakland County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. L. J. Dragovic, who had ruled Curren’s death a homicide, as Dragovic always does when one of Kevorkian’s assisted suicides is an Oakland County resident, as the majority have been.

“‘Does Dr. Dragovic have no shame?!” Fieger demanded. “This was her [Curren’s] decision. What does it take with you people? Why do you repeat these lies? It is an outrage!” Fieger was nearly shouting now. “I dare ‘em to take us to trial! I dare Thompson to charge us! Without a law! Let’s do it again, let’s waste some more of the taxpayers’ money. Or else shut up. I’m through with it!” In the end, Kevorkian was never charged with any crime in the Curren case; her husband vigorously denied that her death had been anything other than a suicide.

No one argues that Jack Kevorkian brought the issue of assisted suicide out of the closet, took the risk and faced the consequences. But it is Geoffrey Nels Fieger, a 45-year-old Detroit-area native, who has shaped and directed this debate, won the big victories and rubbed it in whenever he could. He has shown up at Kevorkian’s suicide scenes to threaten police, boss the media, or bail Kevorkian out of jail; orchestrated Kevorkian’s acquittals; and run to the rescue whenever a Curren case comes along. He has been the perfect foil, it seems, for the bizarre and sometimes comically ineffective efforts by Thompson and the Michigan legislature to stop Kevorkian. As one judge remarked: “I don’t know of anyone else who could have gotten three acquittals.”

In Kevorkian’s third trial--in April, for the assisted suicides of Marjorie Wantz, 58 (No. 2, severe pelvic pain) and Sherry Miller, 43 (No. 3, multiple sclerosis)--prosecutors relied on a Michigan Supreme Court ruling that Kevorkian could be charged with violating Michigan common law, even though there was no specific statute on assisted suicide when Kevorkian helped Wantz and Miller die. (The court cited a 1920s case in which a man helped his ill wife kill herself. No law at the time addressed assisted suicide, either, so the Michigan courts ruled the act a homicide as defined by 1800s English law.) Fieger pounced. “You want to see the law in Michigan on assisted suicide?” he declared. “Here it is.” And he held up a poster-sized blank page. Kevorkian walked.

Despite Fieger’s victories, the fire seems hotter, the stakes higher than ever. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the Michigan state court ruling upholding the original, nearly 6-year-old injunction filed against Kevorkian that bans him from assisting suicides, leaving him open to another trial. Fieger, in turn, asked the U.S. District Court in Detroit to permanently bar Thompson and his successors from prosecuting Kevorkian for helping people die.

Meanwhile, police appear to be keeping close tabs on Kevorkian. On Oct. 23, Royal Oak, Mich., police officers intercepted Kevorkian at a local hospital immediately after he had delivered the body of Barbara Ann Collins (No 44, ovarian cancer), 65, a South Falmouth, Mass., microbiology researcher. “Police dragged Jack out of his car,” Fieger thundered, “beat him up and then stole his car. This is plain and simple harassment.” According to Royal Oak Police, the officers “acted appropriately in a possible homicide” and merely detained him.

If nothing else, Fieger has established that hauling Kevorkian into court is never a good strategy, that this issue is destined for wider forums. Some doctors are beginning to publicly formulate guidelines, should assisted suicide become the law of the land; Oregonians voted in 1994 to enact a physician-assisted suicide law that is making its way through the courts; federal appeals courts have struck down state laws banning assisted suicide in California, New York and Washington; and the U.S. Supreme Court announced last month that it will review several lower court rulings on assisted suicide.

In the meantime, there is the Curren case--one of several Kevorkian-assisted suicides whose illnesses, medical examiners say, were either not terminal or did not exist. Unfazed by increasing scrutiny, Fieger on Sept. 11 held his third press conference in a week to announce that he was filing a civil-rights lawsuit against members of the Bloomfield Township Police Department and Oakland County prosecutors. Police the weekend before had interrupted a “consultation” between Kevorkian and Isabel Correa, 60, of Fresno, Calif. (No. 40, a rare spinal tumor, paralysis). Fieger claimed that police “Nazis” had kicked the door in; then he announced that the next day, Kevorkian had quietly helped Correa die anyway. The scene was repeated with Nancy DeSoto (No. 43, Lou Gehrig’s disease), a 55-year-old Illinois woman. On Oct. 16, Royal Oak, Mich., police interrupted a “consultation” between DeSoto and Kevorkian at a motel. Eighteen hours later, Kevorkian wheeled her body into a local hospital.

Even to Michigan’s suicide-conditioned populace, this seemed brazen. Though polls still show 50% of Americans support assisted suicide under certain conditions, there is a sense that something has gone circus here, that assisted suicide may be OK but that Jack and Geoff, pushing the envelope with each new patient, are no longer the right messengers. “That’s wrong,” Fieger says. “First of all, we’re the only messengers. And second, the only circus is the police and the prosecutor. What did we do? We simply refused to back down and we simply refused to shut up.”

*

In June 1990, fresh from Janet Adkins’ deathbed, Kevorkian stood in Oakland County circuit court. Prosecutor Richard Thompson was seeking an injunction to stop him from assisting any more suicides. Kevorkian, acting as his own counsel, likely would have gone to jail and faded from memory had not the judge, and friends, told him to get a lawyer. So he called the offices of Fieger, Fieger & Schwartz the following Sunday, which has amused Fieger ever since. “Jack doesn’t realize that most people don’t work on Sundays,” he says.

But Fieger happened to be there with his wife, Kathleen (they had been attending a polo match nearby and had stopped by the office on their way home.) Why call Fieger? Kevorkian had seen on television news how the lawyer had won a large judgment from a hospital that refused to pay. Fieger got a court order and the sheriff’s department hauled out the hospital’s furniture and computers. The hospital paid. Kevorkian liked that.

Fieger, then 39, invited Kevorkian, then 62, and his sister, Margo Janus, right over that Sunday. The men talked. Kevorkian was not inclined to hire him, he recalls.

“I wasn’t ready to pick anyone then, really. My sister talked me into it.” But, he adds, “I got the idea early on that he felt deep down that this is the right kind of issue. And whether he believed in it or not, really, he believed in it enough to help me for my benefit.”

They were, and continue to be, cosmic opposites. Kevorkian, built like a well-fed scarecrow, has cropped white hair and dark, sharp eyes. An unmarried pathologist, he at the time lived quite happily in a small, sparsely furnished, windowless apartment in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Mich. He does not smoke or drink, and eats like a refugee. He hates publicity and fends off movie and book deals and the lecture circuit, where, Fieger says, he could make a fortune. After spending most of his career as a pathologist in small hospitals, he considered himself a failure by the time he met Fieger. (Because of his assisted suicides, his Michigan medical license has been suspended and his California one has been revoked.)

On that Sunday in 1990, Fieger was already a successful trial lawyer specializing in personal injury and medical malpractice, having won millions in settlements and verdicts. Towering over his diminutive client, Fieger, fusses over his appearance and favors blue pin-striped suits. He had studied theater and speech at the University of Michigan and earned his law degree in 1979 from Detroit College of Law. Fieger, the eldest of three siblings (his brother, Doug, gained fame as singer of the Knack, known for the 1979 hit “My Sharona”; sister Beth Fieger Falkenstein is a TV writer), he covets publicity, swears like an adolescent and loves vodka. He will be deceased before he ever considers himself a failure.

It was, it turned out, a marriage made in hell, which suits both stubborn men fine. They argue in private. They argue in public. They argue in court. “He’s my worst enemy,” Fieger says.

Fieger was an unlikely--and unpopular--lawyer to handle Kevorkian’s case. Since most of his work had been malpractice cases, colleagues considered him weak in criminal law. Critics say Fieger also has a habit of stretching the truth beyond recognition. Or, they charge, he outright lies, then back tracks with great bluster after the lie has had its desired effect.

“Once he got into the [Kevorkian] case,” says Michael Modelski, a former Oakland County assistant prosecutor who faced Fieger at the injunction, “an attorney called me and said, ‘Let me warn you, if you deal with Fieger, you should have two other people with you. One with a big stick to beat him off you, and another person to just take down whatever he says.’ Because he will reverse himself every five minutes. In fact, sometimes he’ll lie even though the truth may help him more. He’ll say things he knows are quotable quotes, that will make a headline. He did that all the time.”

Fieger is best known for his enormous ego, which is “bigger than all outdoors,” says his friend, attorney Sheldon Miller, echoing all who know Fieger. He has alienated most lawyers, many judges and members of the press. No one is sacred. He once told Detroit Cardinal Adam Maida to “put up or shut up” when Maida established a hot line for the suicidal. He described Jesus Christ as “just some goofball who got nailed to the cross.” He called Michigan Gov. John Engler “a totally stupid, fat sonofabitch.” He pasted a clown nose onto a blown-up photograph of prosecutor Thompson. He told religious groups to go to hell and a young reporter that he would use puppets in one of Kevorkian’s trials; the reporter printed it.

Thomas Kienbaum, former president of the State Bar of Michigan, took the unusual step of publicly criticizing Fieger for his outrageous behavior. “I felt I had to do it for my profession,” Kienbaum says. “Even plaintiff’s lawyers who are his colleagues come up to me and say, ‘I wish you could control the guy.’ ” (In return, Fieger, who claims he’s never talked to Kienbaum, calls him “a brown-nose ass-licker.”)

Meanwhile, Fieger faces disciplinary proceedings before Michigan’s Attorney Discipline Board for accusing a prosecutor of covering up a murder and for calling Michigan Court of Appeal judges “amazingly stupid.” In the same conversation, he told the judges to stop acting like “squirrels, mollusks and lizards.” Kevorkian admired that particular combination of words. Fieger says he is simply exercising free speech. In addition, he is unapologetically aggressive. A sign on his office doors says it all: “Allow me to disparage you mildly for soon I shall excoriate the entire family of your adversary.”

But there is more to this man, friends and family say. He is very smart, possibly as smart as he claims. He is passionately loyal. For instance, he named his law library after Jimmy Jefferson, the Fieger firm’s janitor for decades. He fought thunderously with his father, Bernard, a civil rights lawyer, when Fieger joined his father’s practice in 1979 but he kept his father’s name on the firm when the elder Fieger died nine years later. He shuns country clubs and has an affection for ordinary folks. He can be generous. When expanding his law firm to an adjoining lot, he donated to charity a house he had removed. At restaurant gatherings, says Janet Good, founder of the Hemlock Society of Michigan, “he’s very generous at picking up the tab.”

By most accounts, Fieger actually cares about Kevorkian and assisted suicide, even though he had not given much thought to the issue before Kevorkian walked into his office. But raised in an ultraliberal Unitarian home (his mother was a rabble-rousing union organizer and teacher), he had no religious or moral objections. Irreverent by nature, he was perhaps better prepared than most to repel the opposition Kevorkian has encountered from powerful figures such as the Catholic Church, the religious right and the American Medical Assn. Finally, his father’s death from diabetes complications after long suffering may also have played a role in his ready acceptance of assisted suicide.

Whatever his motives for defending Kevorkian, Fieger has become one of assistant suicide’s most vocal proponents and a nearly hysterical critic of religious opposition to it, invoking separation of church and state. This is not about the right to die, he says again and again; we will all die. It is about the right not to suffer. Family members of assisted suicides never prosecute; they only express gratitude.

There is no apparent financial windfall in all of this for Fieger. Kevorkian has no assets and lives on Social Security. Fieger represents him pro bono and was already wealthy and well-known in medical malpractice circles before Kevorkian. His annual income exceeded $1 million as early as 1990, and in 1993 alone he won an $18-million judgment. He owns five homes--one in the Caribbean and four in prosperous Oakland County, one of which he rents to Kevorkian for a bargain-basement $350 a month. He vacations at posh health farms and is frequently seen at Detroit’s best restaurants.

Fieger has stated that Kevorkian has received various donations, some sizable, from supporters. But so far, there appears to be no smoking financial gun, no secret stash of money hidden in some empty coffin or a Fieger & Fieger slush fund. But there is no estimating the notoriety Fieger has gotten out of the Kevorkian case. And it is likely notoriety, not money, that fuels Fieger.

His prowess in a courtroom is acknowledged even by critics. He can absorb and utilize facts almost brilliantly, says Louis Genevie, social psychologist and president of Litigation Strategies in New York, a jury consulting firm that Fieger hired for the Kevorkian trials. “He’s an incredibly effective communicator. He’s been able to take information and spin it into a story.” And, says attorney Mayer Morganroth, who assisted Fieger in the third trial, “his ego does not get in the way of his getting help.”

Fieger usually keeps a surprise or two up his sleeve, knows when to hammer a witness, when to step softly and when to play the emotional trump card. He brings in tearful family members of Kevorkian’s patients, plays videotapes of the patients crying, resolute. Even Modelski, the former Oakland County assistant prosecutor, credits Fieger’s skill. “He uses emotion, silence. He uses these nice big displays. He’ll blow up pictures of the victims. Things like that. As a showman, he’s fantastic. His cross-examinations are usually good, too.”

But it has been Fieger’s closing arguments, his nearly legendary ability to sweet-talk and sway a jury, that has clinched his cases. Last March, at the close of the second of Kevorkian’s three trials, he used few notes and orated for nearly two hours.

“We are about to make history. When Merian Frederick was born, she cried and the world rejoiced. When Merian Frederick died, the world cried, and she rejoiced.

“Dr. Jack Kevorkian is passing among us--and I’m standin’ up, not only for him, but I’m standing up for Merian Frederick and I’m standing up for all freedom-loving people who believe that when the disease process is done, and when pain is insurmountable, when death is sure, agony is real, when nothing can be done except to prolong your existence on earth at your expense, you have an absolute, fundamental right to make a decision without the police kicking in your door. Let the patient’s last act on earth never, never, never, never, never, never be a crime. Ever.”

*

On a Sunday afternoon in September, Fieger relaxes in his West Bloomfield, Mich., home. Handsome, comfortable and surprisingly free of ostentation like all his residences, it is situated on the edge of a golf course and dominated by large art pieces and a baby grand piano. Fieger plays neither golf nor piano. His wife, Kathleen, 45, (she goes by Keenie), a former advertising account executive now studying architecture, does most of the decorating and the shopping. On the shelves of the cozy library are “First in His Class,” a Bill Clinton biography; “The Lives of John Lennon”; “Wired” by Bob Woodward. There are Chekhov novels and volumes of plays. Fieger the foulmouth, the vulgarian, turns out to be a Shakespeare fan.

He wears a black, sleeveless T-shirt, black jeans and sips spiked fruit juice as he pops vitamins. Keenie comes in with bagels. They laugh over Fieger’s picture on the front page of The Detroit News and Free Press, which depicts him walking next to Isabel Correa the night before her assisted suicide, his hair flying in the wind. “You look like Bozo,” Keenie observes. Fieger, still on the soapbox, calls Thompson a “liar” for saying in the paper that only six police busted up the meeting with Correa. “There were 20 cops. I was there.”

The incident just meant more publicity: two press conferences Friday and Saturday; a session on “Good Morning America.” The previous week, a crew from the German magazine Stern followed him around. Fieger and Keenie cannot go anywhere without being recognized--which Fieger enjoys much more than the reserved Keenie. Yet he complains vaguely that he has lost his privacy: “I can’t do bad things anymore.” And he was not happy when newspapers reported that Keenie, his wife of 13 years, has twice filed for divorce and claimed he had assaulted her. Fieger says the abuse charge was the result of Keenie’s lawyer’s overactive imagination. Keenie declines to comment. Fieger says they are working things out and may try to have or adopt children (but not a white child, Fieger says, because “I don’t think real bright white Americans are putting children up for adoption.”)

He settles into a family room chair and mentions that he hates it when people assume his college theater background influences his lawyering. What you see is who he is, he insists, having learned long ago that “the first time you act in front of the jury or try to play a role, they will beat the s--- out of you. You better be yourself.”

Fieger was very much himself in late August when he tried a large medical malpractice case in Wayne County Circuit Court in Detroit. To understand Fieger, you need to watch him in court, where he is as comfortable and content as most men are in their easy chairs watching the World Series.

The case was typical of Fieger’s bread-and-butter business and a good example of how the notoriety from his high-profile pro bono client influences it. During jury selection, for example, Fieger told candidates they should disregard anything he may have done regarding Kevorkian’s cases. One woman, red-faced, could not, sputtering her disgust with him shortly before the judge dismissed her. Fieger was hardly ruffled. “You don’t hate me as much as the lady who just got up and left, do you?” he purred to the next potential juror.

Later, beset by media hungry for quotes about the latest Kevorkian suicide, he held one of his trademark press conferences in the hallway just outside the courtroom. His opposing attorneys fumed as he pontificated before photographers, reporters and bright television lights. When Judge Diane Hathaway received a request to photograph Fieger in court for another Kevorkian-related story, his thoroughly exasperated opposition objected. (Fieger argued aggressively in favor of the media, but Hathaway denied the request.)

During the trial--he represented the estate of a man who died after brain surgery at a Detroit-area hospital--Fieger showed his many faces and finely tuned courtroom skills. In opening arguments, he was the kindly, deferential college professor, patiently educating jurors about the definitions of “estate,” “negligence” and “damages.” Throughout, he never let a medical term go unexplained.

He displayed a poster-sized blow-up of the man’s family and explained that no one had wanted to hurt the victim. “Negligence is just missing the red light. No one wants to go through a red light, and that’s what this case is all about.” Surrounded by enlargements of medical records, he called his witnesses and quickly referred to the appropriate documents as if he had studied them for months (in fact, he had gone over the details of the case for only a few days). He handled his witnesses adroitly, going easy on the African-American nurse who took care of the victim, careful not to alienate the African-American jurors, and pummeling the brain surgeon who, he tried to show, had barely checked on his patient after the surgery. He was by turns bold and sarcastic but always measured and plausible. During breaks, out of the jury’s view, he reverted to his adolescent-football player self, proclaiming loudly, “I wouldn’t take my dog to that hospital!” At lunch he drank iced tea and held court, oozing self-confidence and entitlement.

He lost the case. You never know with juries, was his shrugging post-mortem. The loss, like the others he has had and will have, did nothing to diminish his self-esteem. There is a reason for this, he will tell you, quite calmly and without a trace of irony, settling back in his living room armchair. It is that, simply, he is the best.

“There was a certain point that Muhammad Ali realized he was the greatest fighter on earth. I’m positive Wayne Gretzky realized he was the greatest hockey player. And there was a point at which I realized I was as good as they make them. I know that sounds conceited, but I know that I am. I’ve done everything. I’ve done civil. I’ve done criminal. I’ve done the biggest-profile cases. I have such a fundamental understanding of the law, I am able to create things. Every case, I get to paint a new picture, I get to paint a new reality. I’m a master.”

But can Fieger actually master the mega-issue that assisted suicide promises to become? As the debate deepens and ages, the opposition mounts. The Michigan Legislature is working on another ban. Reporters, excited by the Judith Curren case, keep digging. Thompson, now a lame duck, announced last month that he was seeking a contempt hearing to determine whether Kevorkian violated the nearly 6-year-old court order barring him from assisting suicides. If a time bomb is ticking, Fieger doesn’t hear it.

The debate over assisted suicide “needs to go to a different level,” he says. “After six years, it is so clear that Kevorkian is a committed, passionate, intelligent, caring doctor who is doing it as ethically as one can do it.” In Fieger’s court, “We’ve won. The fact of the matter is, despite attempts to control public opinion, we have been successful, overwhelmingly, on this issue in winning the hearts and minds.” And after all, the only opinion that really matters is that of his client. Kevorkian isn’t crazy about his lawyer’s vulgarity, his appetite for publicity. But Fieger is always there, and Fieger wins.

“I suppose, for the first time in my life, I really feel I have achieved success,” Kevorkian says. “I always felt my career and everything was a failure. And it still may be. But I feel successful now because of the freedom I have to do what I want to do. Of course, he’s helped me do that.”

“One unique thing that no one ever points out,” Jack Kevorkian’s lawyer characteristically points out himself, “is that Darrow lost Scopes. The Chicago Seven got convicted. Martin Luther King got convicted.

“Kevorkian,” says Geoffrey Fieger, “didn’t.”