American Notes New York

He was, in the words of one patient, "friend and family to everyone in town." But last week Dr. John Kraai, 76, of Fairport, N.Y., a Rochester suburb, was under arrest on a charge of second-degree murder. The general practitioner was accused of carrying out a mercy killing by injecting three doses of insulin into the chest of Frederick Wagner, 81, a nursing-home resident with brain-degenerating Alzheimer's disease. Wagner was Kraai's friend as well as his patient. Monroe County Sheriff Andrew P. Meloni said that the doctor was "overwhelmed with emotion at (Wagner's) deteriorating condition." After Kraai was heard to speak of suicide, he was held overnight in jail, then freed on bail following psychiatric observation.

In another putative mercy-killing case, the independently elected Florida cabinet refused 4, to 2, to approve Governor Bob Graham's recommendation that Roswell Gilbert, 76, be freed while he appeals his life sentence for killing his ailing 73-year-old wife last March. Gilbert, said Florida Comptroller Gerald Lewis, "took an action I don't believe society can condone. The law does not give one person the right to kill another because of illness."