Jack Kevorkian
From Philosopedia
Kevorkian, Murad (Jack) (26 May 1928 — 3 June 2011 )
Michael Betzold, author of Appointment With Doctor Death (1993), once asked Dr. Kevorkian what he thought happened after one dies. “You rot,” replied the retired pathologist who had achieved notoriety in the 1990s for having assisted more than 130 seriously ill individuals to kill themselves.
Although castigated by his opponents as “Dr. Death,” Dr. Kevorkian believed that euthanasia must be made legal through carefully designed physician-assisted suicide for individuals who have no hope of recovering from their illness. He merited the wrath of various Christian officials but countered with the argument that religion and medicine should be completely divorced. Or, as his lawyer described it,
- If the church is in charge, man, we might as well go back to the fucking Inquisition.
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The Physician
As a physician Kevorkian was trained to focus on and address the underlying problem, rather than be distracted by symptoms, and he had seen pointless suffering which could have and should have been ended to everyone’s benefit. Meanwhile, Michigan law outlaws physician-assisted suicide, and the state suspended Dr. Kevorkian’s medical license because of his invention of “Mercitron,” a machine that allows individuals to kill themselves painlessly at the flick of a switch.
“The world knows I’m not a criminal,” he argued. “You’ve lost common sense in this society because of religious fanaticism and dogma. You’re basing your laws, and your whole outlook of natural life, on mythology! It won’t work!” His book on the subject, in which he argues for the goodness of planned death, is Prescription: Medicine (1993).
His Atheism
In a Playboy profile (August 1994), Kevorkian was asked if he was ever religious and replied,
- Not really. I went to Sunday school until I got tired of the myths. Walk on water! You can’t fool a kid.
An atheist, Dr. Kevorkian addressed the annual convention in 1991 of the Freedom From Religion Foundation meeting in Ann Arbor. In 1994, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist Hero of the Year. In 1995, he assisted the Unitarian minister John Evans, who was suffering from pulmonary fibrosis, a terminal lung disease, to commit suicide. Evans was the twenty-second person of over forty Kevorkian, whom some began to call “Dr. Life,” had assisted as of the end of 1996. Asked if he would be present when the U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue of doctor-assisted suicide, Kevorkian responded, “Nothing good can come of this. Did anything good come out of [the abortion case of] Roe v. Wade? You got some doctors killed. What the Supreme Court does is irrelevant. . . . You want me to go down there and face nine religious kooks?” Meanwhile, Kevorkian was considered by many to be a medical kook.
His Conviction
Betzold. in “The Selling of Doctor Death” (The New Republic, 26 May 1997), detailed the many criticisms of Kevorkian’s endeavors to pioneer the radical change in the way human beings die. In what legal scholars considered a major mistake, Kevorkian chose to represent himself in a 1999 case brought against him for having helped end the life of Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old from a Detroit suburb who suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. The incident was televised, Mr. Youk’s family was present, Mr. Youk pleaded for medical help in ending his suffering, and Kevorkian was seen on film injecting the lethal chemicals. A jury, however, convicted him of murder. The Youk family, which was not allowed to speak at the trial, was disturbed by the jury’s verdict, as was the Hemlock Society. However, a group of disabled people, called Not Dead Yet, was heartened, viewing the euthanasia movement as threatening to disabled people. Kevorkian responded by threatening to starve himself in jail, and his friends prepared to appeal the jury’s decision. Found guilty by a Michigan judge, Kevorkian was sentenced in 1999 to ten to twenty-five years in prison despite pleas on his behalf from the widow and brother of the terminally ill man he was convicted of killing. He planned to appeal the conviction but was not allowed bail. Meanwhile, his supporters held that the Michigan lawmakers, not Kevorkian, should be jailed for having written such inhumanistic legislation. The doctor, they claimed, had now become a 20th century freethought martyr.
His Ancestry
Kevorkian, who is of Armenian ancestry, was an honorary member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. His hobbies include playing flute with a jazz quintet, composing (“A Very Still Life: the Kevorkian Suite” for flute and jazz quintet), and oil painting. A 1997 showing of thirteen paintings were said by critics to be those of an amateur, but they disturbed many viewers because they depicted severed heads, moldering skulls, rotting corpses, and a frame which was stained with his own blood. The doctor’s fascination with the subject of death - even as a young physician, he photographed the eyes of dying patients, finding this “interesting” - has led to the speculation by his opponents that he would assist suicides not only for the terminally ill but also for people with “severe trauma” or “intense anxiety.”
His Jailing
Mayer Morganroth, a Michigan lawyer for Kevorkian, asked on 19 May 2006 for the Michigan State Parole Board and Governor Jennifer M. Granholm to grant his client a pardon or the commuting of his sentence, saying Kevorkian would probably not survive another year if kept in prison.
Kevorkian, however, was not released until May 2007, having served eight years in jail for having assisted more than 130 suicides in the 1990s. The terms of his release included that he must never again help any terminally ill person to end his or her life. According to The New York Times (4 June 2007), Dr. Kevorkian was unhappy that no progress had been made during his long incarceration to allow assisted suicide, that even Oregon's law is insufficient. He called the government "the tyrant," the public "sheep," and the harshest of his critics "religious fanatics or nuts." He found the time in prison boring but completed two self-published books, Amendment Nine: Our Cornucopia of Rights and a collection of paintings, music, limericks, and philosophy on life and death.
His Critics
"Dr. Kevorkian's Wrong Way," editorialized The New York Times (5 June 2007) upon his release from jail, is that he "has emerged from prison as deluded and unrepentant as ever." Citing "his ego and a limitless appetite for publicity," the editorial described his fundamental flaw: "his cavalier, indeed reckless, approach. He was happy to hook up patients without long-term knowledge of their cases or any corroborating medical judgment that they were terminally ill or suffering beyond hope of relief with aggressive palliative care. This was hardly 'doing it right' as Dr. Kevorkian likes to believe. . . . Oregon, which has the only law allowing terminally ill adults to request a lethal dose of drugs from a physician, requires two physicians to agree that the patient is of sound mind and has less than six months to live," the better solution according to the editors.
In March 2008, according to reporter Charles Crumm in Michigan's Oakland Press that covers the area where he resides, Kevorkian announced that he planned to run for Congress, without party affiliation, to represent the 9th District seat in Michigan now held by Republican Joe Knollenberg, who is running for re-election. On 9 July 2008, Kevorkian had secured 3,200 valid signatures and announced his bid to run for office.
Obituary in The Economist
Following is part of The Economist obituary for Dr. Kevorkian:
- Though censured by lawyers, clergymen and the American Medical Association, Dr Kevorkian proved difficult to stop. Frequently arrested, he would argue persuasively that he was merely helping unhappy people to carry out their own wishes. Jurors in three trials acquitted him, perhaps making him think he would for ever remain beyond the reach of the prosecutors and legislators he so loved to taunt. From the first, he made no effort to conceal his role in helping people die, sometimes notifying the police after the event and even having it filmed. Indeed, it was the televising of a tape of him actually administering a lethal injection that eventually put him in prison. But even then he publicly regretted not his actions but only his decision to conduct his own defence.
- The judge who sentenced him said the trial was not about the political or moral correctness of euthanasia, it was about breaking the law. “You had the audacity to go on national television,” she said, “and dare the legal system to stop you. Well, sir, consider yourself stopped.” He was, though he was released on parole after only eight years of a 10-25-year sentence.
- Dr Kevorkian was hardly lovable. Bombastic and arrogant, he would liken himself to Galileo, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He revelled in opprobrium. He exploited the vulnerable. Yet he also helped people who surely wanted to die, and with reason. He is also credited with promoting hospices and the wider use of strong painkillers for the dying. Even good causes, of course, may have creepy champions.
His Death
The Michigan pathologist who publicized assisted suicide had checked into Detroit's Beaumont Hospital on May 18th. He died after suffering a relapse, according to his lawyer Mayer Morganrot, who thought he suffered a pulmonary thrombosis when a blood clot from his leg broke free and lodged in his heart. "It was peaceful, Morganroth told the Detroit Free Press. "He didn't feel a thing."
{Associated Press, 6 January 1997, 20 May 2006, and 12 Mar 2008); E; HNS2}
