The Miami Herald, Inc.; Sunday, March 2, 1997
Lori Rozsa; Herald Staff Writer

For someone who has fought so hard to die, Hall shows remarkably little interest in death.

"It's immaterial to me," said Hall, an AIDS patient who for five days was the only person in the United States who could legally get his doctor's help to kill himself. "If all I did was sit here all day and think about dying, I would probably be suicidal."

That is one thing Hall is not.

"The man upstairs has given me strength to go this far," Hall said. "I'm not giving up yet."

For more than a year, Hall has been waging a court battle to change Florida law and allow physician-assisted suicide. He is 35, and became infected with the virus that causes AIDS 16 years ago.

Hall, along with two other terminally ill men and their doctor, Cecil McIver, sued the state last year, volunteering to become the test case the American Civil Liberties Union and the Hemlock Society were looking for on the issue.

They argued that an 1868 law that makes it a second-degree misdemeanor for someone to help another person "commit self murder" is unconstitutional. They said Florida's broad right to privacy laws allow a terminally ill patient to seek the help of another person -- a doctor -- to die.

After a weeklong trial in West Palm Beach in January, retired circuit judge Joseph Davis ruled that Hall does have the right to get McIver's help in administering a fatal dose of drugs when his life becomes unbearable.

Another judge, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Lucy Chernow Brown, agreed with Hall after the state argued for a stay. But the Florida Supreme Court agreed with the state that McIver and Hall should be prevented from taking any action until the justices decide the case. They are scheduled to hear oral arguments May 9.

Whether Charles Hall will last that long is debatable. His fellow plaintiffs in the lawsuit died before the trial even began. Richard Cron and Charles Castonguay both died of cancer last year.

Hall weighs 105 pounds, down from the 170 pounds his 5-foot-10 frame wore comfortably for most of his adult life. He can't eat solid foods, because his throat is raw from the more than 100 different medications he must take daily.

"I drink iced tea and juice," Hall says, sipping from one of the two cups he keeps at his bedside. "My wife keeps buying me baby food, but I can't even get that down."

He smokes Kool cigarettes -- "my only vice now," he says. His days of "heavy partying" are over. He used to abuse alcohol.

"Then I got rehabilitation," Hall said. "It's called my wife. She said I either give up the bottle, or her."

He can't walk, because of arthritis, and has to be placed in a wheelchair if he wants to leave his bed.

Four unopened jars of Beechnut baby food sit on a shelf next to his bed. They would be an incongruity in any other adult's room. But Hall's room is more like a combination of a hospital room and teenager's hideaway, crowded full of medicine and crafts and toys.

He props himself up with pillows on an orthopedic bed that has a special oscillating mattress to prevent bed sores. Boxes of medication are stacked on shelves next to evidence of Hall's hobbies and interests.

A model of a Star Trek spaceship remains in the box, unbuilt because Hall's eyesight has deteriorated so badly that he is now legally blind. That also makes it hard for him to read the science fiction books he loves.

He did finish a model of a space shuttle, and somebody gave him a coffee mug with a shuttle and his name on it.

Peeking out from the walls and shelves all over the small room are smiling frogs -- ceramic frogs, plastic frogs, drawings of frogs. He collects frog-related items.

"I've just always liked frogs," he said.

On another shelf is a neat array of colorful yarn. His favorite hobby is crocheting. He's made more than a dozen afghans, and with the help of bright lights, can still stitch if he holds the work close enough to his face. He's working on a white border for a new afghan.

Hall is also working on a quilt he wants sent to Washington, to be attached to the national AIDS quilt. That will be after it's displayed by his casket. He's sewn in his name and date of birth.

Someone else will have to add the date of his death. That is, unless he wins his legal battle, and can choose the day himself. "I have the right to choose how I die," Hall states simply and strongly. "People don't have to die painful, tragic, drawn-out deaths. I don't have to die that way. There's no reason for it."

Hall watched his grandmother die from cancer. His mother cared for her for months, feeding her, diapering her. The elderly woman lost all sense of where she was, who she was, who her family was, her grandson said. It was painful for everyone in the household. It was not what Hall considers a dignified death.

"We all deserve to die with dignity," Hall said. "I don't want to wither away like a vegetable."

So why not kill himself without all this trouble? People do it all the time -- they lay their head on the railroad tracks, jump from a highway overpass, stick a gun in their mouths and pull the trigger, give themselves an overdose of medicine -- without the help of a doctor.

"With my luck, I'd mess it up," Hall says about committing suicide on his own. "If I shot myself, what kind of thing would that be for my wife to see, coming home and finding all that blood? I wouldn't want to involve another person like that."

So Hall fights on. Most likely, his battle will wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Justices there will rule this summer on two similar right-to-die cases out of New York and Washington.

But the Florida case is different, because Hall and McIver base their claim on Florida's Constitution, which is more liberal when it comes to the right to privacy than the U.S. Constitution.

The state of Florida is fighting just as hard to keep that 1868 law intact. To allow doctors to help their patients die is just one step down a very "slippery slope," Assistant State Attorney General Michael Gross said.

After that, the elderly and infirm, the depressed and poor, could all become unwilling victims of involuntary euthanasia.

Hall is the first to acknowledge that he's an unlikely vanguard for such a burning issue of our time.

"I used to be so quiet; I never voiced an opinion," he said. "Now, you can't shut me up."

He has strong opinions on Dr. Jack Kevorkian, probably the best known figure in the assisted suicide debate.

"I can't understand how Kevorkian thinks he's helping people," Hall said. "He's ending lives for no reason. He's a murderer. He puts the bodies in a van and drops them off at the emergency room. That's wrong."

He said Kevorkian offered to help him.

"I wouldn't let him on my property, let alone through the door," Hall said.

Hall was born in the small Central Florida town of Inverness, one of nine children. He hasn't seen his biological mother since he was very young. His father and stepmother raised him and two brothers in a small house, supported by his father's $75 weekly paycheck from construction jobs.

Hall graduated from high school in 1979 and entered the Army for two years. He went on to get an associate's degree in electronics.

After that, he got a job as a restaurant trouble shooter. He was working for Pizza Hut when he contracted HIV. He said his doctors traced it to a blood transfusion during surgery to remove a cystic fiber around his spine in 1980.

He didn't know he had the disease until he fell suddenly, seriously ill in 1988.

"I felt so ugly and disgusting," Hall recalls. "I closed the door and hid in the house for a week. Then I realized, this is no way to live."

He became an AIDS activist, helping organize the Citrus County AIDS Task Force. He's learned the ins and outs of getting help through the maze of health care agencies, so he passes those tips on to others. He worries every day about the bills. Between his wife's income as a "retailer," (he wouldn't be more specific) and his Social Security checks, the two have $1,200 a month to live on. Medicaid and Medicare pay some of the health care costs, but not all.

"Some days I just sit here and cry, thinking about the bill collectors," Hall said.

He feels stigmatized in this mostly rural county, so much so that he doesn't want his wife's name to appear in the newspaper.

Beverly Hills, where he and his wife rent a small house, is a community of hundreds of cookie-cutter homes, built close together in the middle of what used to be rolling cattle pasture 80 miles northwest of Tampa.

Hall said he and his wife were shunned at the Lutheran church they used to attend, so now he worships God at home. He has his Bible and the crosses he crochets for friends as testimony to his beliefs.

People around town still don't understand the seriousness of AIDS, Hall said.

"I have three friends with it, and they're going around sleeping with everybody they can," Hall said. "It made me so mad, I called the police. I told them these men are going out there purposely spreading this. They said they couldn't do anything about it."

Hall stays busy, especially since early February, when a local company donated a personal computer. He's been inundated with e-mail ever since, most of it supporting him and his cause, he says. His email address: charles@sunco.com

He doesn't mind the celebrity thrust upon him because of the case, though he didn't like it when a Tampa TV station tried to land a helicopter near his house. And he quickly turned down another station's request to be there when he dies.

Hall doesn't know exactly when that will be, but he knows what will trigger the decision: "When I can't get out of this bed anymore."

If Hall wins the right to choose the time and manner of his death, he may have to go to Palm Beach County. That's the only place Jupiter doctor McIver is permitted to help Hall die, under the court order that is being appealed.

Hall would just as soon drift off in his sleep some night, never to wake again to the pain that racks his body daily. But he doesn't want to go before his lawsuit is decided.

Meanwhile, he has planned his funeral to the letter. A closed casket, because "I don't want people to remember me this way," his AIDS quilt block nearby, a short service, burial at the military cemetery in Hillsboro.

Afterward, he wants his brothers to throw a big party, a barbecue and play his country music favorites -- Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash.

"It's going to be a big party, to celebrate life, not death," Hall said. "I'll be in a better place. I'll be in heaven."

CAPTION: photo: Charles Hall (a), Charles Hall in wheelchair (a)

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