The notion that a serious message can be carried by the worst possible messenger finds no better illustration than in the case of the unfortunate Dr Jack Kevorkian.
For more than a decade, advocates of doctor-assisted suicide, both inside and outside the medical profession, have cringed publicly as Dr Kevorkian became the media darling on this most difficult of issues.
With his tasteless theatrics - he has on occasion held news conferences dressed in costumes, or shackled himself to portray the court's attempts to restrict his liberties - Dr Kevorkian has been the most visible force advocating legalised euthanasia.
His personality has not been the one serious advocates have hoped for. A pathologist, not a clinician, by training, Dr Kevorkian has been eerily fascinated with death since he was a young man. His chief hobby was once painting. His subject: dead people's open eyes.
In short, by almost any measure Dr Kevorkian simply seems like a ghoul.
With his home-made contraption dubbed the suicide machine, the hollow-cheeked "Dr Death" has presided over at least 130 deaths, helping terminally ill, or at least seriously ill, people to die. The circumstances of many of those suicides have not been elegant.
To avoid prosecution of families who have been involved, Dr Kevorkian's "patients" have died in his old beat-up van, or in cheap motels in Michigan.
He has complained of the absence of dignity in those surroundings, but blames the laws of the United States.
Dr Kevorkian has been tried four times for illegally assisting suicides. He was acquitted three times, and one case ended in a mistrial.
His luck ran out last week. Prosecutors in Michigan tried him for the murder of 52-year-old Mr Thomas Youk, who was suffering from Lou Gehrig Disease, progressive paralysis.
The case was different this time because Dr Kevorkian was actually charged with murder, not with assisting suicide. Because of that, he was deprived of the opportunity to present testimony from Mr Youk's family.
In the past, such emotional family testimony has swayed juries, but this time it did not matter. In a murder, it is irrelevant if the victim consents.
It is important to remember, however, that Dr Kevorkian practically forced prosecutors to charge him. He videotaped Mr Youk's death and sent the tape to a nationally televised programme. It was a dare, a plea to advance his own martyrdom, and it succeeded. Dr Kevorkian now faces 10-25 years in prison. Lest he be eclipsed from the limelight, he has promised to starve himself in jail.
The larger question, beyond the antics of a 70-year-old man seeking fame, is the state of assisted suicide. Will laws be changed to allow doctors to help ill patients to die? And if they are, will abuses occur?
Oregon provides the best answer. Voters there have twice, by a margin of 60 to 40 per cent, approved the Death with Dignity Act. In 1998, the first full year when assisted suicide was legal in the state, 15 people legally committed suicide with the help of doctors, out of a total of 29,000 deaths in the state.
"This law has been seldom and carefully used with no failures, no complications, no misdeeds, no mistakes," said Mr George Eighmey, executive director of Compassion in Dying, a non-profit group.
What is surprising perhaps, is that Oregon's law has not spread elsewhere. Similar ballot measures have failed in 20 states.
Americans are still reluctant to formally legalise something that many doctors, in consultation with families and the wishes of the ill, simply do quietly every day, administering lethal doses of painkilling drugs to terminally ill people.
The likelihood is that this practice will continue, quietly, even as Dr Kevorkian continues his noisy campaign from inside prison walls.