<s docid="LA090890-0037" num="11"> Bertram R. Harper says his wife died Aug. 19 exactly the way she wanted, in a motel room, with her husband and daughter holding her hands, comforting her and in a state where she believed they wouldn't be prosecuted for their assistance in her death.</s>

<s docid="LA090890-0037" num="12"> After she had stopped breathing that stormy night, Harper, 72, called the police.</s>

<s docid="LA090890-0037" num="13"> He and his stepdaughter told them exactly what happened -- how they had come from Loomis, Calif., near Sacramento; how Virginia Harper, 69, suffering from advanced cancer, had taken sleeping pills and how he had assisted her in slipping a plastic bag over her head.</s>

<s docid="LA090890-0037" num="14"> When the first few attempts failed, he told them, he'd waited until she had fallen asleep and then put the bag on her himself.</s>

<s docid="LA090890-0037" num="15"> He secured it around her neck with rubber bands.</s>

<s docid="LA090890-0037" num="21"> Wayne County Prosecutor John O'Hara wanted to send a message, two months after a Michigan doctor, Jack Kevorkian, had made headlines by using his so-called "suicide machine" to help an Oregon woman die: The state is no mecca for mercy killing.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0035" num="10"> When a doctor from Michigan helped an Oregon woman with Alzheimer's disease commit suicide last week, he knew his decision -- and hers -- would kindle a debate on medical ethics and mercy killing.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0035" num="11"> While authorities debate the doctor's actions, a new survey shows that although some Americans might disagree with the methods used by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a Detroit pathologist, all segments of the public support right-to-die policies.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0035" num="12"> There is a widely held belief that physicians should sometimes allow a patient to die rather than use the full range of medical procedures and treatments available.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0035" num="13"> And Americans, regardless of their religious beliefs, overwhelmingly support the right of patients to make their own decisions about life-sustaining treatment.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0035" num="14"> If a person is unable to make his or her decisions known, people say a close family member should be allowed to make the call.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="13"> My mother's family were farmers in South Africa and somewhere in the family folklore there is a story of a young man and his best friend riding out into the bush to shoot game.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="14"> Some 20 miles from home they encounter and wound a lion.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="15"> But the friend is thrown from his horse and terribly mauled by the wounded beast.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="16"> His injuries were appalling and agonising.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="17"> Obviously he cannot survive the long rough journey home.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="18"> To leave him and ride for help is to abandon him to the lions.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="19"> To stay with him only a prolongation of his terrible pain.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="20"> The only kindly solution is quick and merciful oblivion.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="21"> The bullet in the back of the head was his only option and so he shot his friend.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="34"> There has been much comment in the press about the case of Dr Alan Cox, tried and convicted in Winchester Crown Court for the attempted murder of a patient.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="38"> Clearly the Winchester jury was right in law.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="39"> Dr Cox intended to kill.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="40"> He was therefore guilty.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="41"> But mens rea (guilty intent) is a slippery fish.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="42"> The doctor's choice of drug was not a painkiller but a heart stopper.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="43"> A bullet would have had the same purposes and effect.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="44"> He chose to end the pain by ending the life.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="45"> But his intention was not malign, it was benign.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="55"> It is too dangerous to allow mercy killing to go on sub rosa amid a kindly conspiracy of silence among the medics.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="56"> The conclusion I draw from this, though with some trepidation, is not that euthanasia in such circumstances must be always banned.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="57"> It is rather that the burden of this decision must not be left to doctors.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="58"> The vast majority of cases will continue to fall on the acceptable side of the line, and will offer patients the benign exit through pain killing drugs: but these exceptional cases will have to be held by the community through appropriate panels in partnership with the best medical advice.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="59"> Death is not a medical responsibility.</s>

<s docid="FT924-15580" num="60"> It belongs to all of us.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="20"> Today, however, some leading physicians shudder at the thought of Kevorkian, his "death rounds" and his role in a controversial case of what he calls medically assisted suicide -- the death of a 54-year-old Alzheimer's sufferer from Oregon.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="45"> A lifelong bachelor living off his savings in a tiny, ill-furnished, walk-up apartment in Royal Oak, Mich., not far from his boyhood home in Pontiac, he spent his solitary days in libraries, reading.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="46"> His thoughts were increasingly dominated by the issue of suicide for the terminally ill.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="47"> And so when Janet Adkins came to him earlier this month, eager to end her life, eager to stop the suffering of Alzheimer's disease before she became mentally incompetent, Kevorkian was ready.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="48"> He had already traveled the slippery ethical slope that leads from medicine to euthanasia.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="49"> In his own mind, he was no longer a practicing pathologist.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="50"> Instead, he printed up new business cards.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="51"> On them, he called himself an "obitiatrist," with its root in the word "obituary": a doctor of death.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="52"> "The world's first," he says.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="53"> On June 4, Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old mother of three from Portland, Ore., climbed into the back of Kevorkian's rusting old Volkswagen van in a rural Michigan park not far from here and allowed Kevorkian to connect her to his homemade "suicide machine".</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="54"> She then pushed a button three times to ensure the machine's death-inducing drugs would course through her veins.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="55"> "Thank you, thank you," were her last words, her neck arched as she beamed up at Kevorkian's face.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="56"> The next day, Kevorkian exploded into America's consciousness.</s>

<s docid="LA062190-0255" num="57"> Overnight, his role in Adkins' "doctor-assisted" suicide had ignited an emotionally charged, nationwide debate over the right-to-die issue.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="11"> Nancy Cruzan, a 33-year-old automobile crash victim who remained comatose for nearly eight years as a landmark right-to-die case involving her went all the way to the U.S.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="12"> Supreme Court, died Wednesday in southwestern Missouri.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="13"> Cruzan died at the Missouri Rehabilitation Center in Mt.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="14"> Vernon with her family at her bedside and about 20 "right-to-life" protesters huddled in subzero temperatures outside.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="16"> "Knowing Nancy as only a family can, there remains no question that we made the choice she would want," her parents, Joe and Joyce Cruzan, said in a statement read by Donald Lamkins, the hospital administrator.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="19"> Since she nearly suffocated in a January, 1983, early morning automobile accident, Cruzan had been in a "persistent vegetative state," a form of permanent unconsciousness in which she was able to breathe on her own but had no awareness of her self or her surroundings.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="20"> Her face was red and bloated; her arms and legs were severely contracted.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="21"> Her medical care had been estimated to cost the state about $130,000 a year.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="22"> Cruzan died 12 days after Judge Charles E.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="23"> Teel Jr. of Jasper County Circuit Court in Carthage, Mo., ruled that her parents could stop her artificial feedings.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="24"> The feedings, through a tube surgically placed into Cruzan's stomach, were stopped within hours.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="30"> Teel's Dec. 14 ruling ended a three-year legal fight that resulted in a landmark U.S.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="31"> Supreme Court decision in July.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="32"> The high court ruled that a person whose wishes are clearly known has a constitutionally protected right to reject life-sustaining treatment.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="33"> But the court said also that states, as Missouri had done, may limit the practice of allowing families to make such decisions for persons whose wishes are not clearly known and who are so disabled that they are unable to speak for themselves.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="48"> Right-to-life groups have depicted the decision to halt Nancy Cruzan's feedings as a form of euthanasia, or mercy killing.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="53"> "I feel very comfortable with the Cruzan case," said Dr. Jerome Tobis, chairman of the bioethics committee at UCI Medical Center in Orange.</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="54"> "There is always the risk of a slippery slope. . . that may lead to abuses, but with caution, I don't think there's any basis to think so" .</s>

<s docid="LA122790-0176" num="55"> However, he added: "The Cruzan case should not sanctify active euthanasia, a very important thing that we in the medical profession and ethicists in this country are certainly opposed to".</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="10"> For more than six years, 32-year-old Nancy Cruzan has lain unconscious, kept alive by round-the-clock care and feedings through a tube surgically implanted in her stomach.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="11"> Since Cruzan nearly suffocated in an automobile accident, she has been in a "persistent vegetative state," a form of permanent unconsciousness in which she is able to breathe on her own.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="12"> Like thousands of other patients in this condition, she has no awareness of herself or her surroundings.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="13"> Her face is red and bloated; her arms and legs are severely contracted; when she is awake, her eyes move randomly in all directions.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="14"> And she may remain this way well into the next century, unless the U.S.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="15"> Supreme Court decides otherwise.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="16"> Although there is no hope for recovery, Cruzan has a normal life expectancy.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="17"> Her care at a state rehabilitation hospital here costs about $130,000 a year.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="18"> Cruzan, like most young accident victims, had not left specific instructions about whether she would want to be kept alive indefinitely in a coma.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="19"> Her parents, however, armed with strong beliefs about what their daughter would want if she could realize her condition, have been fighting a legal battle to stop her tube feedings and let her die.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="20"> "Nancy would not want to live like this," her father, Lester (Joe) Cruzan, said in a recent interview at the family's home in Carterville, the small southwestern Missouri town where Nancy was born and reared.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="21"> "The last thing that we could do for her is to set her free".</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="22"> "Twenty years ago, Nancy would have died that night, but medicine stepped in and pulled her back," said her older sister, Christy White.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="23"> "So now what we would like to see is medicine step out and let her go".</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="24"> When the Supreme Court announced earlier this month that it would review the Missouri Supreme Court decision that Cruzan's feedings must be continued, it transformed the anguish of one family into one of the nation's most important "right-to-die" cases.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="25"> It is the first time the high court, despite four previous requests, has agreed to rule on the circumstances in which medical treatment can be halted, a topic that is routinely debated and decided in state courts, state legislatures and in hospitals nationwide.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="26"> The case, Cruzan vs.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="27"> Director of Missouri Department of Health, will be argued this fall.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="28"> A decision is expected early next year.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="30"> If the court makes a broad ruling one way or the other, it likely "will be the most significant decision on death and dying and overshadow even the Karen Ann Quinlan case," said Alexander M.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="31"> Capron of the USC Law Center in Los Angeles, an expert on medical ethics.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="32"> In that landmark 1976 case, the New Jersey Supreme Court granted a father's request to remove his comatose daughter from a respirator.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="33"> The decision -- which the U.S.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="34"> Supreme Court declined to review -- set the stage for a gradual expansion of the rights of individuals to determine the course of their medical treatment, particularly at the end of life.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="35"> The Cruzan case raises anew some of the thorniest questions in medical ethics, as well as the role of the federal Constitution in shaping medical practice.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="78"> Initially, the family had hopes for Cruzan's recovery.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="79"> They became active in a head injury support group.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="80"> But gradually, in mid-1986, they realized that she was not going to get better.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="81"> Slowly, her parents reached a decision to seek the removal of her feeding tube.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="94"> The Cruzans anticipated that a court order would be necessary to discontinue the feeding tube.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="97"> In the fall of 1986, the Cruzans set in motion the protracted series of events leading to the court case.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="98"> They contacted the Society for the Right to Die, which has assisted many other families in similar circumstances.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="99"> Through the Kansas City chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, they were put in touch with Colby, of the firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon, who is representing them without charge.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="100"> In the spring of 1987, the hospital denied their formal request to stop the feedings.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="101"> In October, they asked their county probate court to intervene.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="102"> In March, 1988, a three-day trial was held in the county courthouse at Carthage.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="103"> In July, Circuit Judge Charles E.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="104"> Teel Jr. ruled for the family.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="105"> He held that Missouri's 1985 Life Support Declarations Act -- which prohibits the withholding of artificial feedings -- violated Cruzan's federal constitutional rights to decline medical treatment, including nutrition and hydration.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="118"> In a widely cited 1986 Florida case, an appellate court allowed the removal of a nasal feeding tube from a 75-year-old woman in a persistent vegetative state, ruling that her constitutional rights to decline treatment took precedence over a state law prohibiting the removal of such feedings.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="120"> California law does not specifically mention artificial feedings, although local and appellate courts have upheld the withdrawal of such feedings.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="121"> For example, in a 1988 case similar to the Cruzan case, an appellate court authorized a relative to order disconnection of the nasal feeding tube that had sustained a 45-year-old San Jose man since a 1983 auto accident.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="122"> Both the state Supreme Court and the U.S.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="123"> Supreme Court declined to hear the case.</s>

<s docid="LA072989-0067" num="124"> The man, William Drabick, died after the tube was removed.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="9"> An Alzheimer's patient traveled 2,000 miles to commit suicide with the help of a doctor who built a device that gave her a lethal dose of chemicals.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="10"> The last thing Janet Adkins told Dr. Jack Kevorkian on Monday was, "You just make my case known".</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="11"> Then, he said, she pressed a button on the contraption that released the lethal mixture.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="12"> Some medical ethicists Tuesday called the doctor's actions immoral and perhaps illegal.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="13"> A prosecutor said he would wait for autopsy results before deciding whether to charge Kevorkian, and will seek an injunction to prevent the doctor from using the device again.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="14"> Kevorkian told the Associated Press in a telephone interview late Tuesday that it was the first time he had used the device to assist a suicide.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="21"> Kevorkian said Mrs.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="22"> Adkins traveled to Michigan during the weekend to use his suicide device.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="23"> He drove the 54-year-old woman in his van to a park in northern Oakland County on Monday afternoon.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="24"> According to Kevorkian, he and one of his relatives attached Adkins to a heart monitor, then put an intravenous tube in her arm.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="25"> The tube first delivered a saline solution.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="26"> Kevorkian said Adkins then pressed a button that injected thiopental, a coma-inducing drug, followed moments later by potassium chloride, which stops the heart within minutes.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="27"> He said she was unconscious in 25 seconds, and died in five or six minutes.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="28"> "It simulates exactly the judicial executions that we do now with legal executions, except with this device the person does it himself by pushing a button," Kevorkian told the Detroit News on Monday.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="29"> The doctor is a retired pathologist and an outspoken advocate of what he calls doctor-assisted suicide.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="37"> Kevorkian said Adkins came to Michigan with her husband and a friend, both of whom stayed at a motel while she died and caught a flight back to Oregon later Monday night.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="38"> In Oregon, providing the means to commit suicide is a felony, but Michigan has no law against suicide assisted by a physician.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="39"> Kevorkian said the Adkinses contacted him in October after learning about his device, and he recommended treatment with an experimental drug at a Seattle hospital.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="40"> "It didn't work," Ron Adkins said.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="41"> "It was hard on us, all of us, because we've been mourning for an entire year knowing that this was what she had in mind".</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="42"> The device itself -- an aluminum frame with three suspended bottles and a small electric motor -- is not illegal, said Gerald Poisson, assistant Oakland County prosecutor.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="43"> But in certain cases, the person who made it available to the suicide victim could be charged with homicide, he said.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="48"> According to the American Medical Assn., passive euthanasia is ethical, said Reinhard Priester of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="49"> Passive euthanasia might, for example, involve withholding food from a comatose patient believed to have no chance of recovery, he said.</s>

<s docid="LA060690-0053" num="50"> But Priester said Kevorkian, by arranging a suicide ostensibly with the patient's consent, appeared to have participated in active euthanasia -- which the AMA has deemed morally inappropriate.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="10"> A judge on Thursday dismissed a first-degree murder charge against the inventor of a suicide device, saying he broke no law in helping an Alzheimer's disease patient kill herself.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="11"> The judge announced his decision after hearing a tape of the Oregon woman discussing her fight against the disease.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="12"> "I've had enough," she said on the tape.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="13"> Janet Adkins suffered from Alzheimer's disease, but she might still be alive had she not turned on Dr. Jack Kevorkian's device on June 4, District Judge Gerald McNally said at the end of Kevorkian's two-day preliminary examination.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="22"> Prosecutor Richard Thompson filed the murder charge six months after Adkins died in the back of Kevorkian's van in a county-owned campground.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="23"> Kevorkian notified authorities after Adkins was dead.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="24"> He was questioned by state police officers but was not arrested until Dec. 3.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="25"> Autopsy results released in late November showed that Adkins, 54, of Portland, committed suicide with an overdose of medication.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="26"> Fieger said in closing arguments that Kevorkian attached an intravenous tube to Adkins' right arm, but the tube carried only a harmless saline solution.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="27"> The drugs that caused Adkins to lose consciousness and then stopped her heart did not enter her body until after she threw the switch on Kevorkian's device, Fieger said.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="28"> Closing arguments were heard after the prosecution played a videotape that police officers had seized when searching Kevorkian's apartment.</s>

<s docid="LA121490-0059" num="29"> On the tape, made June 2 in a motel room, Kevorkian, Adkins and her husband, Ronald, discuss her struggle with Alzheimer's, which causes irreversible brain degeneration, and her decision to ask for Kevorkian's help in ending her life.</s>

<s docid="LA061490-0082" num="9"> Ronald Adkins, husband of the Portland, Ore., woman who committed suicide with the assistance of a doctor near here last week, tried to leave the area quickly on the afternoon of his wife's death and initially tried to evade police questioning, state police and local prosecutors said.</s>

<s docid="LA061490-0082" num="10"> Not until he was in the doorway of an airplane at Detroit's Metropolitan Airport and being questioned by a Michigan State Police detective for a second time did Adkins acknowledge that he was the husband of the dead woman, Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Alzheimer's disease patient, officials here said.</s>

<s docid="LA061490-0082" num="30"> The June 4 death of Janet Adkins, who killed herself in the back of a rusting 1968 Volkswagen van with the aid of a drug-dispensing "suicide machine" devised by Kevorkian, has caused a nationwide sensation and sparked emotional debate over the "right to die".</s>

<s docid="LA061490-0082" num="35"> In a hearing before the ruling, Kevorkian told the court he first spoke with Janet Adkins the weekend before her death, when she and her husband flew to Michigan to meet him.</s>

<s docid="LA061490-0082" num="36"> Before that, he said, he had spoken only with Ronald Adkins.</s>

<s docid="LA061490-0082" num="37"> He said the husband first contacted him last October, after Janet Adkins had read about his "suicide machine".</s>

<s docid="LA061490-0082" num="38"> Ronald Adkins contacted Kevorkian again in May, the doctor said, after some special treatments had failed to slow Janet Adkins' decline.</s>

<s docid="LA061490-0082" num="39"> Ronald Adkins told Kevorkian by phone that his wife was more eager than ever to end her suffering.</s>

<s docid="LA121390-0235" num="9"> A judge today threw out a murder charge against Dr. Jack Kevorkian in the death of an Alzheimer's disease patient who used his so-called suicide machine to take her life.</s>

<s docid="LA121390-0235" num="14"> McNally's ruling came after a two-day preliminary hearing to determine whether Kevorkian, of suburban Royal Oak, should stand trial.</s>

<s docid="LA121390-0235" num="15"> An outspoken advocate of the concept of doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, Kevorkian has acknowledged hooking up Adkins to his machine, which put a lethal combination of drugs into her bloodstream after she pushed a button.</s>

<s docid="LA121390-0235" num="18"> On Wednesday, attorneys introduced a suicide note purportedly signed by Adkins, saying she freely chose to have Kevorkian help her commit suicide before she deteriorated further from Alzheimer's.</s>

<s docid="LA121390-0235" num="19"> "This is a decision taken in a normal state of mind and is freely considered," the note read.</s>

<s docid="LA121390-0235" num="20"> "I have Alzheimer's disease and I don't want it to progress any further.</s>

<s docid="LA121390-0235" num="21"> I don't want to put myself or my family through any more of this terrible disease".</s>

<s docid="LA121390-0235" num="22"> Adkins, 54, of Portland, Ore., died shortly after noon June 4.</s>

<s docid="LA121390-0235" num="23"> Later that day, Kevorkian let police search his van and seize his device before offering a statement about his role in Adkins' death.</s>

<s docid="LA090990-0089" num="9"> A 72-year-old man who said love moved him to complete his terminally ill wife's suicide attempt was ordered Friday to stand trial on murder and conspiracy charges.</s>

<s docid="LA090990-0089" num="10"> Bertram Harper faces mandatory life imprisonment if convicted of conspiring to murder his 69-year-old wife, Virginia, who died Aug. 19 in the motel room they rented after flying to Michigan from their home in Loomis, Calif.</s>

<s docid="LA090990-0089" num="11"> Mrs. Harper planned her suicide after learning she was terminally ill with breast and liver cancer.</s>

<s docid="LA090990-0089" num="12"> The murder case against Harper rests largely on his telling police that he put a plastic bag over his wife's head and secured it around her neck after a non-lethal combination of pills and alcohol caused her to fall asleep.</s>

<s docid="LA090990-0089" num="15"> Shanda McGrew, 40, Mrs. Harper's daughter and Harper's stepdaughter, flew to Michigan with them and was present at her mother's death.</s>

<s docid="LA090990-0089" num="16"> She is an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.</s>

<s docid="LA090990-0089" num="23"> Hours after his wife's death, Harper told police they had chose to come to Michigan because they believed the state had no law making it illegal to assist in a suicide.</s>

<s docid="LA090990-0089" num="24"> Under California law, such an act is a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.</s>

<s docid="LA090990-0089" num="28"> Kenny argued that Harper, in tying the bag over his sleeping wife's head and not calling police until an hour after she stopped breathing, did more than simply assist in her death.</s>

<s docid="LA072290-0030" num="26"> State police investigators testified at a preliminary hearing that Delbert told them the death of 64-year-old Bill was a mercy killing.</s>

<s docid="LA072290-0030" num="27"> Investigators say that Delbert told them he smothered Bill in his sleep.</s>

<s docid="LA072290-0030" num="28"> According to the initial autopsy report, a benign tumor the size of a golfball was found in Bill's neck, and he had kidney and prostate tumors that might have been cancerous.</s>

<s docid="LA072290-0030" num="29"> "Bill had trouble with his head.</s>

<s docid="LA072290-0030" num="30"> He accidentally cut his jaw with a chain saw (years ago) and got blood poisoning," said Roscoe Ward, 70, the eldest brother.</s>

<s docid="LA072290-0030" num="31"> "He was doing farm chores up to the day he died, but he wasn't doing too good.</s>

<s docid="LA072290-0030" num="32"> He'd be burning up, and the next time he'd be shaking all over".</s>

<s docid="LA072290-0030" num="33"> Asked whether he thought Delbert was innocent, Roscoe Ward replied: "I sure do".</s>

<s docid="LA121590-0063" num="9"> A county prosecutor said Friday he will not appeal the dismissal of a first-degree murder charge against a retired pathologist whose "suicide machine" was used by an Alzheimer's disease patient to kill herself.</s>

<s docid="LA121590-0063" num="10"> The case against Dr. Jack Kevorkian, of Royal Oak, Mich., was thrown out Thursday by Oakland County District Judge Gerald McNally.</s>

<s docid="LA121590-0063" num="11"> His ruling followed two days of testimony and the viewing of a dramatic videotape in which Janet Adkins told Kevorkian, "I don't want to go on".</s>

<s docid="LA121590-0063" num="12"> Adkins, 54, of Portland, Ore., died June 4 in the back of Kevorkian's van in a remote park.</s>

<s docid="LA121590-0063" num="13"> She was hooked up to an intravenous device that permitted her to inject herself with a lethal solution.</s>

<s docid="LA080190-0135" num="9"> Florida officials signed clemency orders today for an 81-year-old man convicted of shooting his ailing wife in what he said was a mercy killing.</s>

<s docid="LA080190-0135" num="14"> Gilbert is serving a minimum mandatory sentence of life without chance of parole for 25 years for killing his wife, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease and osteoporosis.</s>

<s docid="LA080190-0135" num="15"> He was the subject of a 1987 television movie that dramatized his decision.</s>

<s docid="LA080190-0135" num="24"> The prosecution claimed that Gilbert, a retired engineer, killed his 72-year-old wife, Emily, in March, 1985, after 51 years of marriage because she had become a burden to him.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="11"> A retired Chicago policeman who allegedly killed his crippled wife on Christmas Eve, saying he feared he would not be able to care for her after he undergoes heart surgery, was released on bond Tuesday.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="12"> He faces first-degree murder charges.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="13"> Gerald Williams, 67, shot his wife of 44 years in the head with a.38-caliber revolver as she sat in her wheelchair and then called police to confess and turn over the murder weapon, authorities said.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="14"> Alice Williams, 64, able to control only the muscles in her right hand after a 20-year-long battle with multiple sclerosis, was totally dependent on her husband .</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="15"> "She'd been failing right along the last six months.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="16"> She lost a lot of weight and recently lost muscle control of her face," said Marie Kitzmiller, who lives next door to the Williams' house on the southwest side of Chicago.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="17"> "He was completely dedicated to her," Kitzmiller said.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="18"> "His wife was completely dependent upon him for vital care," said Police Sgt. George Owen.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="19"> "She was totally helpless and in considerable pain".</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="20"> Williams told investigators that his wife had begged him to end her life.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="25"> "His health wasn't the best and hers was deteriorating," said police Sgt. Ronald Palmer, who noted that Williams had undergone a heart operation two years ago but recently learned that the problem had recurred and that he faced additional surgery.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="26"> "He said he would be unable to take care of his wife and himself," Palmer said.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="27"> Williams told police that "all his wife did was complain about how much she was suffering, and she begged him to end it," Palmer added.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="28"> Williams' daughter told police she had spoken to her father earlier Sunday and that he told her his doctor had advised him that he required a second major heart operation and he wouldn't be able to care for his wife, Palmer said.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="29"> "He was a very nice man," said Chester Ciezczak, a neighbor.</s>

<s docid="LA122789-0073" num="30"> "He seemed to always help his wife. . . . He cared for her very much" .</s>

<s docid="FT931-8050" num="47"> If patients and doctors know where to turn for help, cases such as that of Dr Alan Cox, the Winchester doctor who was found guilty of killing a terminally ill patient, will be history.</s>

<s docid="LA011090-0118" num="17"> Caroline Youngquist, 79, full of fire and warmth, is Orange County's volunteer representative for the Hemlock Society, a right-to-die organization that hopes one day to legalize doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.</s>

<s docid="LA011090-0118" num="18"> Although she stresses that she has not directly assisted in anyone's death, a felony under California law, Youngquist refers people to literature that outlines, in precise detail, how they may painlessly take their own lives.</s>

<s docid="LA122689-0126" num="10"> A retired Chicago police officer who feared that heart surgery would render him unable to care for his chronically ill wife faced murder charges today in the woman's Christmas Eve slaying.</s>

<s docid="LA122689-0126" num="11"> Gerald Williams, 67, told investigators he shot his wife in the head to end her suffering.</s>

<s docid="LA122689-0126" num="12"> Alice Williams, 67, was killed by a shot from a.38-caliber revolver as she sat in her wheelchair .</s>

<s docid="LA122689-0126" num="13"> Gerald Williams was charged with first-degree murder.</s>

<s docid="LA122689-0126" num="14"> Alice Williams suffered from multiple sclerosis, a crippling disease of the nervous system.</s>

<s docid="LA122689-0126" num="15"> Friends said she had the disease for 20 years and that her condition was deteriorating.</s>

<s docid="LA041190-0152" num="9"> A paralyzed 50-year-old woman died today just minutes after doctors unhooked her life support system -- a move a judge ruled did not need court approval as long as it was requested by the patient.</s>

<s docid="LA041190-0152" num="10"> After a bedside meeting with her sister and her favorite nurse, Dr. James Sullivan unhooked the respirator that had kept Nancy Gamble alive for 14 months at Baptist Hospital, her attorney said.</s>

<s docid="LA041190-0152" num="11"> Gamble, 50, who was paralyzed by the incurable Lou Gehrig's disease, died "peacefully" 15 minutes later this morning, attorney Mary Martin Schaffner said.</s>

<s docid="LA041190-0152" num="12"> Davidson County Chancellor Robert Brandt ruled Tuesday in the right-to-die suit Gamble filed after Baptist Hospital refused to let her physician remove her respirator.</s>

<s docid="LA041190-0152" num="13"> The judge ruled that Gamble's physician could remove her respirator and for the first time in Tennessee, he also decided that physicians may act without any court's permission to honor a disabled patient's wish to die.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="12"> Last week, in a Detroit suburb, Dr. Jack Kevorkian climbed into his Volkswagen van with 54-year-old Janet Adkins and drove off to a public park.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="13"> There, he hooked up Adkins, who suffered from early Alzheimer's, to his homemade suicide machine.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="14"> A syringe in her arm, Adkins pushed a button that sent two fluids into her body.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="15"> One left her unconscious, the second stopped her heart.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="16"> Her last act, said Kevorkian, was to rise as though to kiss him, and say, "Thank you, thank you, thank you".</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="18"> Kevorkian's lone regret: The dawdling medical examiner did not rush Adkins' body to a hospital.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="19"> "You could have sliced her liver in half," he said, "and saved two babies and her bone marrow could have been taken, her heart, two kidneys, two lungs, a pancreas".</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="20"> Good old Doc Kevorkian, always thinking of somebody else.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="21"> While commentators are saying that Kevorkian has re-ignited the "debate" over the "right to die," there really is no debate.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="22"> There are just two schools of irreconcilable thought, whose adherents talk past one another.</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="23"> The first believes that all men are "endowed by their Creator" with "inalienable rights," and among these is the "right to life".</s>

<s docid="LA061090-0044" num="24"> The second holds that, as there is a right to live, so there is a right to die, that some lives are not worth living and that rational men and women, in a democratic society, can make these choices.</s>

<s docid="LA010990-0051" num="11"> The fatal shooting of Steven Charles Jenkins, a terminally ill AIDS patient, by his friend Philip Lee Saylor on Jan. 2 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has again focused attention on the problems of death and dying in our society.</s>

<s docid="LA010990-0051" num="12"> The attending physician in the case, Dr. Phillip C. Zakowski, expressed his regrets about the apparent mercy killing, saying that although he understood the emotional difficulties of the situation, "allowing us to use morphine (anesthesia) would have been a much more humane way. . . . That is a very comfortable, painless way to let nature take its course" .</s>

<s docid="LA010990-0051" num="34"> We must acknowledge our limitations so that our society can move forward and explore more humane options for dealing with the terminally ill, such as euthanasia.</s>

<s docid="LA010990-0051" num="35"> Unless we provide patients and their families with some way of relieving their anguish, they will continue to use whatever means they feel are available to them.</s>

<s docid="LA060890-0165" num="9"> A Nevada judge today granted the death wish of a quadriplegic who asked to be removed from a respirator that has sustained his life for more than 20 years.</s>

<s docid="LA060890-0165" num="10"> Kenneth A. Bergstedt, 31, said he no longer enjoys life and wants to die in peace.</s>

<s docid="LA060890-0165" num="11"> He asked the court to allow him to take a sedative and have his life-support system turned off.</s>

<s docid="LA060890-0165" num="12"> Bergstedt sought a legal ruling that his actions would not constitute suicide or a crime and that people who helped him would not be subject to prosecution.</s>

<s docid="LA060890-0165" num="14"> After an evidentiary hearing that lasted about an hour, state District Judge Donald Mosley found that Bergstedt was mentally competent to make the decision to end his life.</s>

<s docid="LA060890-0165" num="15"> The judge also ruled that the elements of homicide and suicide were not factors in the case.</s>

<s docid="LA060890-0165" num="16"> "The prognosis is less than encouraging, and there is no real likelihood that life will improve for Mr. Bergstedt," Mosley said in issuing the ruling.</s>

