ASSISTANCE RENDERED

Did the producers of NBC's cop show Law & Order know in advance that the Supreme Court would hand down a headline-making decision about assisted suicide? We don't think so. But tonight's episode, "Heart of Darkness," does deal with the death of a depressed journalist whose demise may be a case of, hmm, assisted suicide.

Yeah, yeah, we know. The court's 6-to-3 ruling was focused on physician-assisted, not girlfriend-assisted, suicide. Just the same, before the ruling, we told our NAJP* colleague Carter Harris, left, who wrote the episode, that we'd promote it here. This is what he had to say:

"It's about a journalist, probably one disturbed by the collapse of the NAJP" -- we apologize for the inside joke -- "but it really deals with a bigger ethical issue: Is it ever okay to help a person suffering from intractable, violent depression to help them kill themselves?" We also apologize for his grammar.

"From what I understand," he went on, "some other countries allow assisted suicide, including Switzerland. And in Amsterdam it's debated as to whether or not doctors should be allowed to help not only terminally ill but mentally ill patients to die. ... My episode doesn't deal with the whole Doctor Kervorkian-type thing, as I wanted to approach it from a less polemical and more personal, and hopefully more dramatic, point of view."

'Nother thing: He adds, "I, Carter Harris, am NOT the journalist featured in the Law & Order episode (unless you want to read a whole lot into it)." We didn't think so, unless the dead can write, but we'll tune into the show tonight just to be sure.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

* NAJP refers to the National Arts Journalism Program, which lost its funding last year at Columbia University and is now defunct. Harris is a former NAJP fellow.