(5/19/99)
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Georgette Smith will be allowed to die, as she wishes, but not until she helps prosecutors build a murder case against her own mother, who she said has robbed her of the will to live.
A Florida judge ruled Tuesday that the 42-year-old Smith, who was left paralyzed from the neck down in March when her 68-year-old mother shot her in the spine, will be allowed to have her life support disconnected after 5 p.m. today.
At that time, doctors will remove from Smith the ventilator that is keeping her alive.
``God, don't leave me this way,'' Smith pleaded to the judge in her deposition, saying she understood that her decision was expected to result in murder charges against her mother, Shirley Egan. Police say Egan shot her daughter March 8 when she heard her say that she wanted to place her in a nursing home. Egan remains in custody.
After Lucerne Medical Center, where she is a patient, refused to disconnect her life support, Smith sued to compel officials to let her die. She got what she wanted Tuesday in Orange County Court when Judge Richard Conrad ruled that she could be taken off a ventilator.
``Ms. Smith has made a difficult choice, a choice which she has the right to make,'' Conrad wrote in his ruling. ``This court has found that she is competent to make that choice.''
But the judge ruled that she must wait until 5 p.m. today. That will give prosecutors, who spent 45 minutes interviewing Smith in the hospital Tuesday, more time to interview her and gather evidence in what is expected to be one of the most unusual legal battles in Florida's history.
Although the judge issued an order barring both sides in the case from speaking about it, prosecutors have said they will probably file murder charges against Egan, who has already been charged with attempted first-degree murder and aggravated battery causing great bodily harm.
Jury will decide
An Orange County grand jury is expected to decide sometime in the coming months whether Egan, a frail, 4-foot-11, 85-pound woman who is blind in one eye, can be tried for killing her daughter when it was her daughter's decision to die.
``All I can do is wink my eyes, wiggle my nose and wiggle my tongue,'' Smith said in the written deposition her attorneys submitted last week. ``I guess that's more than my mom can do, but I just can't take it.''
``I can't move any other part of my body. I want to die because I can't live this way,'' she said.
It is a case of immense sadness, said investigators and family members, and perhaps the first of its kind.
While there have been many cases in which a criminal's actions led, after months or years, to suicides or death from lingering effects from an attack -- leading to murder indictments and convictions -- it might, legal experts say, be the first in which a person of sound mind has chosen to be unhooked from life support, knowing the consequences of the act to herself, and her attacker.
Prosecutors said Smith was shot March 8 in the Rosewood Village Apartments in Orlando when she, her boyfriend and Egan were talking about placing the elderly woman, who had emphysema and had recently been hurt in a car crash, in a nursing home.
When Smith stepped away to get paperwork on a nursing home, Egan fired a handgun at her, prosecutors said. It is not clear how she got the gun. The bullet lodged in Smith's neck and severed her spine at the second vertebra. Then Egan fired the gun again, this time at Smith's boyfriend, Larry Videlock, barely missing him, police said.
An attorney for Egan has said the elderly woman did not mean to hurt her daughter. ``The bullet was meant to serve as sort of a love tap, not to actually cause damage. Had she wished to hurt her daughter, she would have used a more substantial weapon.''
Psychiatric clearance
Smith can speak -- although only with great effort -- but is unable to swallow and must be fed by a tube. She has no control of her bodily functions, and is at risk, doctors said, of pneumonia, ulcers, infections and bedsores.
Doctors said her condition was irreversible, and a psychiatric evaluation found her to be mentally competent.
Her daughters, Candace Smith, 22, and Joeleen Hill, 19, said it was their mother's choice to make.
Their mother's death, if prosecutors follow through on their plans to file murder charges, will be the beginning of a legal struggle over intent, and responsibility: Did Egan end her daughter's life, even though it was her daughter's decision to die?
David Orentlicher, a professor of law at Indiana University and co-director of the Center for Law and Health, said there is a long history of murder charges and convictions stemming from crimes that did not immediately result in death. In the late 1800s, a man who was injured in the leg by another man refused to have his leg amputated when gangrene set in, and died. His attacker was convicted of murder.
`Looks pretty clear'
And in the 1930s, a woman who was raped later committed suicide because she could not live with the shame. Her attacker was convicted of murder.
``This looks pretty clear,'' said Orentlicher. ``The law points in that direction'' of a successful prosecution for murder in the Florida case.
Some legal experts disagree.
``You can't be held responsible for someone else's death unless you cause that death,'' said Peter Arenella, a professor of criminal law at UCLA. ``Shooting someone in the spine can hardly be misconstrued as such.''
Benjamin Brafman, a New York City defense lawyer, agreed.
``It would be a very difficult legal theory,'' he said of the prosecution. ``Because an argument could be made that an affirmative decision to end the life is not a direct consequence of the shooting, but the result of an intervening force.''