Life and Death Issue

At 2:10 p.m. last Aug. 24, Ronald Salem, 34, white, stopped to purchase a package of cigarettes at a corner store in Columbia Point, a predominantly black housing project in Boston's Dorchester section. As he returned to his car he was slammed across the head with a baseball bat. Surgeons at Boston City Hospital operated in vain; two days later, tests for brain waves showed none. Salem was dead. Or was he?

That was the question Superior Court Chief Justice Walter H. McLaughlin and a Boston jury faced late last month as testimony unfolded in the trial of Siegfried Golston, an 18-year-old black charged with Salem's murder. Their conclusion may set a far-reaching precedent. For the first time in a criminal case, a jury explicitly stated it had defined death as the cessation of brain activity, a major departure from the traditional definition of death as the absence of breathing and heartbeat that has been in effect in Massachusetts and most other states.

The issue arose because for seven days following the attack, Salem's heartbeat and breathing had been sustained by life-support machines; when they were withdrawn, all life signs ended. So the question was whether Salem had been killed by Golston with the baseball bat or had died when all hospital maintenance of his body systems ceased.

Influencing the course of the case directly and moving intentionally into unexplored legal territory, Judge McLaughlin told the jury that it could construe brain death as legal death. Thus instructed, it took the jury only an hour to decide that Salem was dead by the second day after the attack and Golston was guilty of first-degree murder.

"Someone had to bite the bullet on this," said McLaughlin after the trial, citing a "void in the law. It is high time the issue was decided legally. There has been so much confusion in hospitals, so much pain for families. The medical profession needed guidelines. Now doctors can know where they're going."*

Still Alive. Defense Attorney John P. White Jr., Colston's court-appointed lawyer, decried the verdict as "judge-made law" and appealed the case to Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court. "Salem was alive," he had argued to the jury, "because his heart was still beating and he was breathing. You can't be alive in one part and dead in another."

The appeal, which will be specifically concerned with the acceptability of the brain-death definition, will be watched intently by both the legal and medical professions. For on one point most agree with Judge McLaughlin: there is a pressing need in the law for a universally accepted definition of death.

*The most celebrated case concerning life-maintaining systems, that of Karen Anne Quinlan (TIME, April 12), is not analogous. She is able to breathe without a mechanical respirator, and her brain still shows electrical activity.

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