BOSTON -- What does Jack Kevorkian demand now? A court-assisted suicide?
After the video had rolled, after 22 million Americans had seen him inject potassium chloride into Tom Youk's arm on "60 Minutes," Kevorkian turned back to the subject that matters the most to him: his own fate. Would he be prosecuted?Youk was little more than a prop for Jack's act, a dead body he could use in challenging authority. "Either they go or I go," he told Mike Wallace, finally exhibiting the emotion lacking from his deathside manner.
"If I'm acquitted, they go because they know they'll never convict me," he said. "If I am convicted, I will starve to death in prison. So I will go. One of the two of us is going to go. And that's why I did this. The issue has got to be raised to the level where it's finally decided."
So we have another scene in the long-running melodrama scripted by and starring the man from Michigan.
How many roles he has played. Dr. Jack, the pathologist, who never had a live patient until he began escorting them to death. Dr. Jack, the obitiatrist, whose first cause was promoting the harvesting of organs from death row inmates. Dr. Jack, the artist, whose oil paintings come replete with severed heads and skulls. Now he's trying out for Dr. Jack, the martyr.
I am not surprised that Kevorkian upped the ante, moving from passive to active euthanasia. Assisted suicide no longer caught the spotlight. Nor did it catch the eye of the county prosecutor elected on the promise that he wouldn't waste more tax money trying Dr. Jack.
But now the new prosecutor has been dared into his duty. He's charged Kevorkian with homicide. It appears that Dr. Jack will return to the courtroom that he once mocked with his Thomas Jefferson costume. Is this, finally, the climax?
I would never have cast Kevorkian for the lead role in the movement for a more merciful death. He forced the issue of assisted suicide and euthanasia onto the public stage, but he also polarized that public audience. Nor would I wish him at my deathbed offering these last words of comfort: "We're going to inject in your right arm. OK? Okey-doke." Okey-doke?
But this time, Dr. Jack is doing more than exposing the thin line between passive and active euthanasia. He is pulling the curtain on public ambivalence. This is where most Americans stand, awkwardly balanced: on one side, unease about legalizing the right to assisted death; on the other side, unease about condemning those who assist in a merciful death.
Michigan is just one example of this ambivalence. This fall, the state overwhelmingly turned down a ballot initiative to legalize assisted suicide. Yet three times, its courts acquitted Kevorkian of assisted suicide. Indeed, the third time, the jurors asked for his autograph and invited him out to dinner.
The latest challenge delivered by Kevorkian -- "either they go or I go" -- has the staged quality of a temperamental actor. But even the most ardent opponent of doctor-assisted death ranks the likelihood of a homicide conviction as close to zero. The law may not make a distinction between delivering death to a healthy man or to one, like Tom Youk, with Lou Gehrig's disease. But jurors do.
As for the lesser charges of assisting suicide and delivering controlled substances, there is enough wiggle room and enough legal technicalities to make Kevorkian's threat of suicide by starvation thin, if not empty. And the issue will not be "finally decided."
It's only six months since the Supreme Court ruled that there was no fundamental right to assisted suicide. The justices encouraged the country to continue "an earnest and profound debate about the morality, legality and practicality of physician-assisted suicide." So far, only one state -- Oregon -- has rationally and carefully legalized aid-in-dying.
For the most part, the country remains both reluctant to change the law and reluctant to enforce it. This is the place we have been driven to by a desire for mercy and a longing for caution.
In the Netherlands, where 2.4 percent of the deaths come at the expressed request of a patient, there is a word to describe this ethical gray zone where many of us live. There, doctor-assisted death is "gedogen," as they say in Dutch: illegal and yet permitted. It's allowed only under strict guidelines for patients suffering unbearable pain and terminal illness.
But here, we are literally at a loss for words. We can arrest and we can acquit. But for the terminally and suffering ill, we have yet to agree on what separates the kind from the Kevorkian. We sit in the audience, chilled to the bone by Dr. Jack's latest act. But we have done too little to establish guidelines to distinguish a merciful death from an icy "okey-doke."
The Boston Globe Newspaper Company