Murder or mercy, jury must decide

Press, 8 December 1976, Page 9

Murder or mercy, jury must decide

NZPA-Reuter New Yorki A grand jury in Long Island, New York, will soon! have to decide whether a man! murdered a 17-year-old girl or whether a hospital ended her! lif- by stopping life-sustaining! machinery. Walter Burton Carey, aged 27, has been charged with murdering Karen Pomroy, who never regained consciousness after being struck about the head with a railway spike last week and robbed of sl. She had been declared clinically and neurologically dead because her brain had stopped functioning, but her heart did not stop until life-sustaining machinery was halted by the authorities in the Southside Hospital on Bay Shore, Long Island. Under the “Harvard criteria,” doctors declared her dead on Tuesday after three brain tests were made. Since none showed signs of brain life, her brain was pronounced dead. But since her parents wanted her eyes and kidneys saved for transplants, the

machine was kept on until Thursday afternoon after I those organs were removed. The medical examiner, Dr i Sidney Weinberg, said the | unusual chain of events raised ja tricky legal problem because the machine keeping her alive was stopped by someone other than her attacker. The defence is expected to claim that the “killing” was done by the hospital authorities and not the assailant. Suffolk County Prosecutor Henry O’Brien has said he expects the case to revolve around whether the cause of death was the blows to the head or the halting of the machinery. Whether brain death—defined as irreversible cessation of brain function—should be legally considered the end of life is a controversial issue in New York, and last year a judge in New York ruled that in some cases brain death could be considered the same as legal death. The case of Miss Pomroy raises some of the same issues as that of another Karen—

Karen Anne Quinlan, a 22 - year - old New Jersey woman who went into a coma in April, 1975, after an apparent drug and alcohol overdose. She was kept attached to a respirator from April 15, 1975, until May 22, 1976, when it was disconnected after a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that her parents could allow her to die. She continued to breathe after it was disconnected, and is still alive. The New York judge said doctors in city hospitals could be permitted to transplant kidneys from a fatallywounded shooting victim whose brain had stopped, even though his body was being kept alive by artificial means. The New York Medical Examiner’s office had claimed that a post-mortem examination had to be done before such organs could be removed from murder victims. Governor Hugh Carey wants the end of brain life to be recognised in the State as the legal definition of death.