Man Who Aided Wife’s Death Backs Right-to-Die Initiative

SACRAMENTO —  A California man acquitted of murder last spring in Michigan for assisting in his terminally ill wife’s death on Wednesday endorsed an initiative campaign to legalize physician-assisted deaths in California.

“What I went through is something nobody else should ever have to go through,” 73-year-old Robert Harper of Loomis told a Capitol news conference. “I think it is morally right for a person who is terminally ill to say, ‘I’ve had a good life. Now let me have a good death.’ ”

Harper, who took his cancer-stricken wife, Ginger, to Michigan last year in the mistaken belief that it was legal to assist his wife’s death in that state, was acquitted of murder by a Detroit jury in May.