Kevorkian, Jack (1928-2011), an American physician, was a leading supporter of the right to physician-assisted death. During the 1990’s, he defied legal restrictions and participated in the deaths of more than 100 patients.
Early life.
Murad (Jack) Kevorkian was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on May 26, 1928. In 1952, he earned an M.D. degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He went on to graduate training in pathology (the study of diseased tissue) at the university and several hospitals in Europe and the Detroit area. He interrupted his medical training to serve in the United States Army from 1953 to 1955.
Kevorkian worked as a pathologist in Michigan hospitals from the late 1950’s until the 1980’s, when he retired from practicing pathology. He then devoted himself to research and writing, concentrating on the medical and philosophical issues involved in death and dying. He came to believe that almost any patient who requests a physician’s aid in dying was entitled to that assistance.
Promoting physician-assisted death.
In 1990, Kevorkian began helping people who asked his aid to end their lives. The first person he assisted was a 54-year-old woman diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She died in Michigan in Kevorkian’s van by means of a machine that he had built to help people kill themselves. Kevorkian connected people to the machine with an intravenous line that first delivered a harmless solution. At a moment of their own choosing, patients pressed a button to receive a drug that put them to sleep. After patients were asleep, an automatic timer delivered a drug to stop the heart.
Soon after the 1990 death, a Michigan judge issued a legal order called an injunction forbidding Kevorkian from assisting in any more suicides. Kevorkian ignored the injunction, and later legal restrictions, and continued to participate in patient deaths. In 1991, the state medical board revoked Kevorkian’s license to practice medicine, taking away his privilege to prescribe drugs. As a result, he replaced the suicide machine with the gas carbon monoxide, which is available without a prescription.
Prior to 1998, Kevorkian stood trial several times for his role in assisted deaths but was not convicted. He felt that these trials failed to resolve the question of whether physician-assisted suicide should be legal. In 1998, Kevorkian tried to force a resolution of the issue by videotaping his participation in a patient’s death. The patient was a 52-year-old man in the final stages of a fatal nerve disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Kevorkian administered the same sequence of drugs used in the suicide machine. He then gave his tapes to the CBS television network, which broadcast an edited version on their news show “60 Minutes.”
Because Kevorkian directly administered the drugs, his action qualified as active euthanasia, the most controversial form of physician-assisted death. After reviewing the tapes, authorities in Michigan charged him with first-degree murder. In 1999, Kevorkian was tried and convicted of second-degree murder and illegal delivery of a controlled substance. The judge sentenced him to serve concurrent prison terms of 10 to 25 years for the murder charge and 3 to 7 years for the drug charge. He was released from prison in 2007 after serving less than 8 years of his sentence. In 2008, Kevorkian ran unsuccessfully for Congress as an independent from Michigan’s Ninth Congressional District. He died on June 3, 2011.
