Hours after a Michigan law banning assisted suicide apparently expired, Dr. Jack Kevorkian Saturday helped a 72-year-old housewife from Royal Oak die in her bedroom. It was his first assisted suicide in more than a year.
The woman, Margaret Garrish, who appeared eight months ago in a videotape in which she complained of unending pain and said, "I would like an out," died about 6 a.m. Michael A. Schwartz, a lawyer for Kevorkian, said she breathed carbon monoxide gas supplied by his client, a 66-year-old retired pathologist.In an earlier interview, Kevorkian said Garrish had severe rheumatoid arthritis, advanced osteoporosis and other disorders that had forced the amputation of both legs and removal of an eye. "Her husband said when he picked her up he could hear her bones cracking," Kevorkian said Saturday.
Last March, Kevorkian, who had vowed to stop assisting in suicides, threatened to help Garrish die unless someone agreed to help relieve her pain. A doctor then prescribed morphine patches, which gave her some relief. "But over time, even they proved insufficient," Schwartz said Saturday.
Schwartz and Kevorkian said the timing of the suicide had nothing to do with the expiration of the state law banning assisted suicide. "Jack's only criterion has always been the patient - when the patient is ready, and when he feels it is medically the right time to help them," Schwartz said. "In any event, the law was null and void from its arrival, since it has repeatedly been found unconstitutional."
The death was the 21st Kevorkian has attended since he began helping people commit suicide in June 1990. The Oakland County medical examiner, Dr. Ljubisa J. Dragovic, promptly ruled the death Saturday a homicide, as he has all of the assisted suicides that have occurred in his county.
But whether Michigan now has any way to ban what Kevorkian does is unclear.
The ban, which went into effect on Feb. 25, 1993, was intended to be in effect only while a commission came up with recommendations on a permanent law. The ban expired on Friday, and the commission's recommendations went nowhere, while court rulings on the temporary ban clouded the issue.
Last December, after nearly three weeks in jail, the doctor promised to stop assisting suicides "until we get some resolution on this from the courts." Since then, the Michigan Court of Appeals agreed with three lower judges and ruled the temporary ban unconstitutional for technical reasons.
The Michigan Supreme Court is reviewing the constitutionality of the statute. Kevorkian was tried under the law this spring, but a Detroit jury found him not guilty, even though he acknowledged having assisted in the 1993 suicide of a man with Lou Gehrig's disease.
But in May, the Michigan Court of Appeals reinstated two old murder charges against Kevorkian stemming from suicides that occurred in 1991. That ruling has also been appealed to the state Supreme Court, and prosecutors have not sought trials in those cases and have not charged Kevorkian with murder in subsequent suicides.