Prosecutor Gets Glimpse of Another Side of Kevorkian

Carl Marlinga, a prosecuting attorney in suburban Detroit, took an unusual phone call recently at his office in the Macomb County Court building.

Jack Kevorkian was on the line.

“Carl . . . Can I call you Carl?” asked the retired pathologist famous for helping scores to suicide during the past seven years.

Granted permission to be informal, Kevorkian moved on. Could he and one of his lawyers possibly pay Carl a visit?

Perhaps it was time for a civilized discussion about the logistics of Kevorkian’s crusade. Perhaps it was time to focus on the people who came to him for assistance in dying, and on the needs of their families.

A face-to-face with Kevorkian would not be a first for any prosecutor in southeast Michigan. But most encounters have been distinctly unpleasant, having taken place in court as the legal system sputtered and fumbled in challenges to “Dr. Death.”

Charged with murder, charged under a short-lived assisted-suicide ban, charged under the common law, the ornery Kevorkian always went free: Dropped inquest. Case thrown out. Acquitted once. Acquitted twice. Acquitted three times. Mistrial.

During the past several years, a few area prosecutors, Marlinga included, have developed mixed emotions. Kevorkian said he wanted people to be able to die with dignity. Marlinga is actually quite sympathetic.

So are Michigan voters, who consistently support assisted suicide in opinion polls and who last fall ousted a prosecutor in neighboring Oakland County because of his repeated attempts to convict Kevorkian.

But the Legislature and the courts have waffled and passed responsibility back and forth.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that there is no federally protected right to assisted suicide. Only common law now applies. Consequently, Kevorkian operates in legal twilight.

Clearly, he cannot be stopped. But he cannot be fully open either.

The irony, then, as a juror who cast a “not guilty” vote in Detroit once noted, is that dying in the back of a rusty van or in a motel room, with your corpse stowed in a parking lot or left unattended for police, is hardly dignified.

Please, Kevorkian and attorney Michael Schwartz asked Marlinga, is there some way an assisted suicide’s loved ones could wait with the body? Is there some way the family could deliver the deceased to a hospital without fear of arrest as an accomplice?

If anyone could come up with a solution, they must have figured, it would be Marlinga, who is familiar with the side of Kevorkian that is charming, witty and intellectually curious--not just with the self-righteous eccentric so often displayed on the stand.

Marlinga, after all, had conversed with Kevorkian over cocktails when both were guests at the annual Christmas party of the pathologist’s lead lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger.

It was Marlinga who defused a rare coroner’s inquest in his county in 1993 with a compromise that let a widow and one of Kevorkian’s associates give depositions in the privacy of Fieger’s office (they had been refusing to do so in open court).

The way Marlinga tells it, the Oct. 6 meeting was relaxed and civil. He really wanted to help. Kevorkian, who had been linked to two recent suicides in Macomb County--the first he had been associated with there since 1993--mentioned that he wouldn’t help with any more in Marlinga’s jurisdiction. The prosecutor was grateful.

For three days, Marlinga gnawed at the matter. But in the end, he could offer no assurances of immunity. “There is no way to assure in advance that a friend or relative is truly free of criminal intent,” he wrote in an Oct. 9 letter, because they “may have had motive to persuade a weakened person.”

Four days later, the body of a 34-year-old woman turned up at the Rainbow Motel in Macomb County. A note advised contacting Fieger.

Marlinga thinks the corpse was Kevorkian’s reply, “a shot fired across my bow.” He is angry now. “He should not pick a particular county or shop for a prosecutor. Spite is disrespectful to the patient. This is a human life.”

A moment has ended.

Kevorkian, Fieger said, is focusing on another, newer project entirely.

“He’s going to harvest organs [for transplant],” Fieger said. “I’ll hold a press conference and we’ll have the organs and I will ask the physicians of the world to come forward and save a life.”