Suicide and the law.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian's attempts to assist terminally ill people to commit suicide may be controversial or even illegal, but there's still one sure way to get legal help for a quick and painless death: you need only commit murder in one of the 22 states which practices execution by lethal injection.

Of course, even people in great pain with no reasonable hope of a cure in their lifetime may be reluctant to take another's life, but what choice does Michigan and some 21 other states leave them? It won't be easy: Dr. Kevorkian's clients were incapable of taking their own lives, so committing murder might already be beyond their capacities. Conversely, if these people proposed operating on themselves, the state would no doubt have urged medical assistance--but since they proposed suicide instead, the state has denied them any help. What basis does the state have for interfering in so highly personal a decision?

In the fifth century, the Catholic church was forced to declare suicide a sin in part because too many people took it as a short-cut to heaven. (The logical conclusion, as St. Augustine pointed out, would be to take one's life immediately after baptism.) The theological justification was that suicide was a rejection of God's gift and a usurpation of a decision that rightfully belonged to him. It was therefore considered a mortal sin.

It was also argued that to bear suffering was noble--an attitude that has not vanished centuries later.

Contrary to popular belief, suicide is not a crime in the United States. It was considered a felony under English common law, and the punishment was burial in a public highway with a stake driven through the body or else a stone placed over it (to keep it from rising due to demonic influences). The last such burial in England was in 1823. Depending upon the circumstances, the suicide's property might also be forfeited to the crown. These penalties were officially abolished in 1961.

The punishment was never adopted in America, and, as the states turned away from English common law, suicide ceased to be regarded as a crime. At, tempted suicide, however, is still illegal in some states. The Model Penal Code specifically rejects criminalizing suicide, either attempted or successful. In fact, its drafters wrote: "There is a certain moral extravagance in imposing criminal punishment on a person who has sought his own self-destruction."

Causing suicide (that is, pressuring someone into it against his or her will) is considered a form of homicide and is illegal everywhere. That is not the same as aiding or abetting suicide, which is illegal in a few states, even though suicide itself is not against the law. Many have argued, with some justification, that it is patently absurd to make it illegal to assist someone in a legal activity. Granting someone the right to die while denying that person help in making it as easy as possible is surely a difference without a distinction.

The issue here concerns only people suffering great physical pain. In cases of severe mental anguish, it can be argued that there is always hope and that experience shows that many people attempting suicide for that reason are really making a desperate plea for help. (Of course, these people are not likely to enlist the aid of a physician.

Until recently, execution in Washington State was carried out by either hanging or lethal injection--the choice belonging to the condemned. In january 1994, a child rapist and murderer named Westley Allan Dodd chose hanging, apparently from a sense of justice or, at least, symmetry, since he had murdered his victims by strangulation, An attempt was made to prevent the hanging on the grounds that it was a cruel if not unusual punishment. At the instigation of the American Civil Liberties Union, an investigator was hired to observe the execution, and an autopsy was later performed to prove that point. Both the investigator and the coroner agreed, however, that death by hanging--at least in this instance--was swift and therefore relatively painless.

Still, people were so repulsed by what appeared to be a barbaric method of execution that the legislature has now made lethal injection the sole means of execution. At the same time, Washington still forbids physicians to assist in a suicide.

Why should the state be more solicitous of a murderer than it is of a person afflicted with an incurable disease? This is not just moral extravagance; it is moral perversion.

Jerome Richard is a freelance writer living in Seattle, Washington. His work has appeared previously in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Monthly, and other publications.