"Dr. Death" Jack Kevorkian dies at age 83

[luv]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/us/04kevorkian.html

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the central figure in the tumultuous national drama surrounding assisted suicide, died Friday in a Michigan hospital. He was 83 and lived in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

The cause of his death was not immediately known, but local media reported that he had suffered from kidney and respiratory problems and that his condition had been worsening in recent days. His death was confirmed by Geoffrey Feiger, the lawyer who represented him during several of his trials in the 1990s.

Dr. Kevorkian, a medical pathologist, challenged social taboos about disease and dying, willfully defied prosecutors and the courts, actively sought national celebrity, and spent eight years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the last of the more than 100 terminally ill patients whose lives he helped end.

From June 1990, when he assisted in the first suicide, until March 1999, when he was sentenced to serve 10 to 25 years in a maximum security prison, Dr. Kevorkian was a controversial figure. But his critics and supporters generally agree on this: As a result of his stubborn and often intemperate advocacy for the right of the terminally ill to choose how they die, hospice care has boomed in the United States, and physicians have become more sympathetic to their pain and more willing to prescribe medication to relieve it.

In 1997, Oregon became the first state to enact a statute making it legal for physicians to prescribe lethal medications to help terminally ill patients end their lives. In 2006 the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that found that Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act protected a legitimate medical practice.

During the nine years between the law’s passage and the court’s ruling, Dr. Kevorkian’s confrontational strategy consumed thousands of column inches in national newspapers, graced the covers of national magazines and drew the attention of “60 Minutes” and other television news programs. His nickname, Dr. Death, and his self-made suicide machine, which he variously called the “Mercitron” or the “Thanatron,” became fodder for late-night television comedians.

Given his obdurate public persona and his delight in flaying medical critics as “hypocritic oafs,” Dr. Kevorkian invited and reveled in the public’s attention, regardless of its sting.

The American Medical Association in 1995 called him “a reckless instrument of death” who “poses a great threat to the public.”

Diane Coleman, the founder of Not Dead Yet, a right-to-life advocacy group that once picketed Dr. Kevorkian’s home in Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb, attacked his approach. “It’s the ultimate form of discrimination to offer people with disabilities help to die,” she said, “without having offered real options to live."

But Jack Lessenberry, a prominent Michigan journalist who closely covered Dr. Kevorkian’s one-man campaign, said: “Jack Kevorkian, faults and all, was a major force for good in this society. He forced us to pay attention to one of the biggest elephants in society’s living room: the fact that today vast numbers of people are alive who would rather be dead, who have lives not worth living.”

In the late 1980s, after an undistinguished career in medicine and an unsuccessful try at a career in the arts, Dr. Kevorkian rediscovered the fascination with death, not as a private event but as a focus of public policy, that had marked his early years in medicine.

As a student at the University of Michigan Medical School, where he graduated in 1952, and later as a resident at the University of Michigan Medical Center, Dr. Kevorkian proposed giving murderers condemned to die the option of being executed with anesthesia in order to subject their bodies to medical experimentation and allow the harvesting of their healthy organs. He delivered a paper on the subject to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Kevorkian shelved his quixotic campaign to engage death for social purposes and pursued a largely itinerant career as a medical pathologist. Though his friends described him as funny, witty, personable and engaging in private, those he met in work and social situations portrayed him as awkward, grim, driven, quick to anger and unpredictable.

[DaFace]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011...orkian-suicide

Jack Kevorkian, the pathologist known as Dr Death who claimed to have helped 130 people commit suicide when terminally ill, died on Friday in Detroit. He was 83 and had been in hospital since last month with pneumonia.

Kevorkian's rise to fame, or infamy, in the 1990s led to a national debate in the United States on assisted suicide. He built a suicide machine, known as the Mercitron or Thanatron, which he operated out of a Volkswagen van to inject a lethal drug dose for people who sought his help in dying. After one of his injections was shown on national television, he served eight years in jail for murder, but lived to see his life made into an award-winning HBO movie last year, starring Al Pacino.

Kervokian provocatively likened himself to Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, but the American Medical Association called him "a reckless instrument of death" who posed a great threat to the public.

For nearly a decade, he evaded efforts to stop him. Four trials resulted in three acquittals and one mistrial. His home state of Michigan had no law against assisted suicide in the early 1990s, but later enacted one in response to Kevorkian's activities.

During his trials supporters filled courtrooms wearing "I Back Jack" badges. He called his prosecutors "Nazis", and said that doctors who did not agree with him were "hypocritic oafs". In 1996 he arrived in court wearing US colonial-era costume of white wig, breeches, gold brocade coat and tricorn hat, and waving a copy of a letter by Thomas Jefferson which he said defended suicide for the terminally ill.

"My ultimate aim is to make euthanasia a positive experience," he told the New York Times. "I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death."

In March 1999 a Michigan jury found Kevorkian guilty of second-degree murder, after he videotaped himself administrating a lethal injection to Thomas Youk, a man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The video was sent to the 60 Minutes TV news show, and caused a national outcry as well as serving as prime evidence for a first-degree murder charge.

"You had the audacity to go on national television, show the world what you did and dare the legal system to stop you," said judge Jessica Cooper. "Well, sir, consider yourself stopped." Kervorkian was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in jail, and served eight years.

Geoffrey Fieger, his lawyer and friend, said: "He was a physician who had an acute sense of compassion and a respect for the dignity of his patients."

Asked if Kevorkian would have chosen to end his life by suicide, given the opportunity, Fieger responded that he had neither the physical or mental strength to make that decision in his final days. "Jack Kevorkian didn't have an obligation or a duty to society to end his life in the manner in which some of his patients did," Fieger said. "Everyone chooses the very end for themselves."

Fieger said of Kevorkian: "It's a rare human being who can single-handedly take on an entire society by the scruff of its neck and force it to focus on the suffering of other human beings. It's a rare human being who has the courage of his convictions, and is strong enough to stand up against the never-ending threats and attacks of the most powerful figures of our society."

Kevorkian's life story became the subject of the 2010 HBO movie, You Don't Know Jack, which earned Al Pacino an Emmy and a Golden Globe award for his portrayal of Kevorkian. Pacino paid tribute during his Emmy acceptance speech, calling Kevorkian "brilliant, interesting and unique". "You're all right Jack," Pacino said waving his award at the doctor, who sat smiling in the audience.

[milkman]

Want to know how I know that mods don't read every thread?

[kstater]

Again?

You'd think with all the practice he's had, he'd get it right the first time.

[Frazod]

I understand he offered his services for reposters as well.

[DaFace]

Boo. Apparently the Google search hasn't updated today. I promise I tried.

[Deberg_1990]

Originally Posted by frazod

I like what Tom Selleck said in Quigley Down Under. "You've got one shot left in that shooter. Make it a good one."

If someone is suffering and dying, let them go.

If someone is so racked by dementia or Alzheimers that keeping them alive benefits nothing but the nursing home's bottom line, let them go.

If someone is so batshit insane that they'll never be right, or fit to be around other people, let them go.

If someone is encarcerated for life or many years and would rather check out, let them go.

The notion of life being precious is a bunch of bullshit. Life is what the person living it makes of it, or what it turns into for that person. Sometimes it's better off ending.

I realize this view will offend some. To them, I say blow me. It's not like we're an endangered species.

Your a cold hearted SOB......

But i cant disagree....

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by Deberg_1990

Your a cold hearted SOB......

But i cant disagree....

Same here.

[Bwana]

Originally Posted by frazod

I have a great deal of respect for this guy - it amazes me how we'll put down terminally ill animals as an act of mercy without a second thought, yet people must suffer needlessly due to religious horseshit and the enrichment of the medical industry. **** them all.

RIP Doc.

Dead nuts on the money.

[listopencil]

RIP

[Just Passin' By]

May he rot in hell

[luv]

Originally Posted by milkman

Want to know how I know that mods don't read every thread?

[cardken]

Originally Posted by frazod

I have a great deal of respect for this guy - it amazes me how we'll put down terminally ill animals as an act of mercy without a second thought, yet people must suffer needlessly due to religious horseshit and the enrichment of the medical industry. **** them all.

RIP Doc.

Double agreed, RIP Doc.

[Frankie]

Originally Posted by frazod

I have a great deal of respect for this guy - it amazes me how we'll put down terminally ill animals as an act of mercy without a second thought, yet people must suffer needlessly due to religious horseshit and the enrichment of the medical industry. **** them all.

RIP Doc.

This. Absolutely.

[Imon Yourside]

He took 130 people to hell with him? I wish not to be there at his sentencing.