DETROIT – Assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, known in the media as “Dr Death” for his efforts to help more than 100 people to end their lives, has died in hospital aged 83.
Dr Kevorkian died at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, where he had been treated for kidney and heart problems for about two weeks , said Mayer Morganroth, his lawyer and friend.
Dr Kevorkian, a pathologist, was focused on death and dying long before he became a defiant advocate, crossing Michigan in the rusty Volkswagen van that carried his machine to help sick people end their lives.
He launched his assisted-suicide campaign in 1990, allowing an Alzheimer’s patient to kill herself using a machine he had devised. He beat Michigan prosecutors four times before his conviction for second-degree murder in 1999.
Dr Kevorkian was imprisoned for eight years for second-degree murder and was paroled in 2007. As a condition of his parole, he vowed not to assist in any suicides.
He was convicted after a CBS News program aired showing a video of him administering lethal drugs to a 52-year-old man suffering from debilitating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
By the time of his release from prison, most assisted- suicide advocates had distanced themselves from his views, even though they credited him with raising public awareness on a taboo subject.
In the US, Oregon, Washington and Montana now allow some form of physician-assisted suicide, or what proponents call “death with dignity”.
“Dr Kevorkian himself may not be a good poster boy for the right-to-die movement,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote in an editorial after his release.
“But with the first of the 75 million baby boomers now moving into their 60s, the uncomfortable questions Dr Kevorkian raised are not likely to go away. On the contrary, they are apt to be with us more than ever.”
Dr Kevorkian also campaigned to persuade government officials to allow vivisection – live operations – of death row prisoners.
His plan was to anaesthetise the inmates, and then cut them open for testing, transplants and organ harvesting before killing them with a lethal injection.
He brushed aside comparisons to the experiments conducted by Nazi concentration camp doctors.
“Those medical crimes apparently were such a horrendous discovery for the civilised world that, regrettably, they seem to have blunted reason and common sense with regard to the rational assessment of the use of condemned human subjects for research, he wrote.
The Armenian-American doctor did not leave the public eye after his release from prison in 2007, giving occasional lectures and in 2008 running for Congress unsuccessfully.
An HBO documentary on his life Kevorkian and a movie You Don’t Know Jack starring Al Pacino brought him back into the news last year.
In a June 2010 interview with Reuters Television, he said he was afraid of death as much as anyone else and said the world had a hypocritical attitude towards voluntary euthanasia, or assisted suicide.
“Now we’ve avoided death because we don’t like death. Religion says that’s a big enemy, leave it alone. But we went beyond birth, into conception. Now we’re dabbling in that,” he said.
“If we can aid people into coming into the world, why can’t we aid them in exiting the world?”
Asked, in an interview with CNN, if he regretted any of his actions, Dr Kevorkian said: “No, why would I? . . . I knew what I was stepping into. I knew I was getting into one of the most illegal things in the world. It was the right thing to do. That doesn’t mean I’m stronger than most people. It just means I’m loonier.” – (Reuters, Bloomberg)