Euthanasia

Supporters of Proposition 161, the initiative permitting physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia for some terminally ill patients, had every reason to be optimistic. As they gathered signatures earlier this year to put their measure on the Nov. 3 ballot, they knew several polls showed that Californians overwhelmingly favored the idea of allowing doctors to help end the lives of hopelessly ill patients who choose suicide.

The day after a landmark court decision approving physician-assisted suicide, attorneys and law professors predicted that the matter will almost certainly find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Some analysts expressed confidence that the Supreme Court will reverse the momentous ruling, but others said the issue is too close to call.

Is it worse to commit a murder than to assist in a suicide? In the eyes of the law, yes, there is a big difference. But in the realm of ethics, there is only a shade of distinction between the two acts. Some would say there is no difference at all. After the CBS news program "60 Minutes" aired a videotape Sunday showing pathologist Jack Kevorkian injecting a dying man with a lethal toxin, Michigan county prosecutors announced they were investigating it as an apparent homicide.

When principals at "60 Minutes" learned two weeks ago that Dr. Jack Kevorkian was offering them a tape of him killing a patient, their first reaction was skepticism. Mike Wallace, who had never met Kevorkian, viewed him as "kind of shopworn and a publicity seeker." And Don Hewitt, the show's executive producer, "had no interest, none whatsoever," recalled Wallace.

For the first time in U.S. history, a federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled 8-3 that a mentally competent, terminally ill adult has a constitutional right to utilize a doctor's assistance in hastening his death. Stepping boldly into "a controversy that may touch more people more profoundly than any other issue the courts will face in the foreseeable future," the U.S.

Glendale police said Wednesday for the first time that they believe at least one murder was committed in connection with the case of the hospital worker who allegedly confessed to killing 40 to 50 people. "We believe that crimes did occur," said Sgt. Rick Young, Glendale Police Department spokesman. When asked what crime, he answered: "Murder."

An anonymous first-person essay in a medical journal in which a doctor describes killing a dying cancer patient with a shot of morphine has touched off a growing controversy over questions of medical ethics and freedom of the press, a controversy complicated by doubt about whether the episode ever occurred. The unusual situation first took shape in early January when the Journal of the American Medical Assn. published the four-paragraph essay under the headline, "It's Over, Debbie."

Concluding that recent court decisions allowing assisted suicide apply only to physicians, a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge refused Monday to dismiss felony charges against a man who helped his AIDS-ravaged lover commit suicide last year. In the first such test of California law since the issuance of opinions by two federal appeals courts, Judge Linda Lefkowitz rejected arguments that the rulings had rendered the state's ban on assisted suicide unconstitutional.

To save the northern spotted owl, federal authorities have listed the bird under the Endangered Species Act, set aside 7 million acres of forest for owl habitat, and imposed stiff fines on those who harm the chocolate-colored football-sized raptors. But the spotted owl population is still in deep peril nearly 15 years after President Clinton brokered a compact to protect its old-growth habitat.

Toward the end of his life, Jeremy Allen drifted around Cambridge, Mass., staying with friends. Now, six weeks after Dr. Jack Kevorkian helped him commit suicide and dumped the body at a hospital, he has no permanent resting place. No relatives have claimed the corpse, and Kevorkian has rejected the Oakland County coroner's demand that he pay the dead man's storage and burial costs. Allen, 52, had kidney cancer and died of an injection Feb. 4.