The Washington Post
June 4, 2011 Saturday
Suburban Edition
‘Dr. Death’ led crusade for physician-assisted suicide
BY: Sindya N. Bhanoo
Jack Kevorkian, 83, the zealous, straight-talking pathologist known as
“Dr. Death” for his crusade to legalize physician-assisted suicide,
died June 3 at a hospital in Royal Oak, Mich.
He had been hospitalized since last month with pneumonia and kidney
problems, close friend and attorney Mayer Morganroth told the
Associated Press.
Dr. Kevorkian spent decades campaigning for the legalization of
euthanasia. He served eight years in prison and was arrested numerous
times for helping more than 130 patients commit suicide from 1990 to
2000, using injections, carbon monoxide and his infamous suicide
machine, built from scraps for $30. Those he aided had terminal
conditions such as multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
and malignant brain tumors.
When asked in a 2010 interview by CNN’s Anderson Cooper about how it
felt to take a patient’s life, Dr. Kevorkian said, “I didn’t do it to
end a life. I did it to end the suffering the patient’s going through.
The patient’s obviously suffering – what’s a doctor supposed to do,
turn his back?”
Dying, he believed, should be an intimate and dignified process,
something that many terminally ill people are denied, he said.
He garnered a fair amount of support from other medical practitioners,
although most thought he was an extremist. In 1995, a group of doctors
in Michigan publicly voiced their support for Dr. Kevorkian’s
philosophy, stating that they supported a “merciful, dignified,
medically assisted termination of life.”
Shortly after, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found
that many doctors in Oregon and Michigan supported some form of
physician-assisted suicide in certain cases.
One of his greatest victories occurred in March 1996 when a U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled that mentally competent,
terminally ill adults have a constitutional right to die with the aid
of medical experts and family members. It was the first federal
endorsement of its kind.
But ultimately, Dr. Kevorkian’s impact was not in the U.S. legal
system but in raising public awareness about euthanasia and the
suffering of the terminally ill.
In the 1990s, the peak of his time in the limelight, he notoriously
tried publicity stunts of all sorts to draw attention to his cause. In
one instance, he showed up at trial dressed in Colonial attire. He
also taped one of his patient’s deaths and gave the video to CBS’ s
“60 Minutes” for broadcast.
During this period, his face was frequently on television and in
newspapers, and he gladly agreed to a barrage of news media interviews
so he could share his views. His crusade and antics were documented
last year in an HBO movie, “You Don’t Know Jack,” in which Al Pacino
portrayed him as a passionate, but intolerably single-minded crusader.
“He was involved in this because he thought it was right, and whatever
anyone wants to say about him, I think that’s the truth,” said Arthur
Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
“He didn’t do it for the money, he didn’t do it for the publicity, he
wasn’t living a luxurious life – he wanted change.”
Despite his best efforts, Dr. Kevorkian was, for the most part, a lone
soldier who had an abrasive personality. Although he was the
best-known figure in fighting for euthanasia’s legalization, the
legislative results of his efforts were largely unsuccessful, if not
counterproductive.
His goal was to make it legal for a doctor to actively help a patient
commit suicide. But to date, no state has made this legal and only
three states, Washington, Oregon and Montana, have legalized any form
of physician-assisted suicide. To the contrary, the state of Michigan,
where Dr. Kevorkian did much of his work, explicitly banned
physician-assisted suicide in 1993 in direct response to his efforts.
“I think Jack Kevorkian was like a flare on the battlefield – he lit
up the issue and everyone paid attention,” Caplan said. “He got to
absolute center stage, but he didn’t have the nuance to take it
forward the way he wanted to.”
Dr. Kevorkian’s path to becoming a doctor was not as unusual as his
career that followed. Born on May 28, 1928, in Pontiac, Mich., he
wanted to be a baseball radio broadcaster, but his Armenian immigrant
parents encouraged him to pursue a more practical path. He graduated
from the University of Michigan’s medical school in 1952 and began a
residency in pathology.
It was about this time that his obsession with death began. In the
1950s, he first received the nickname “Dr. Death” when he began
photographing patients’ eyes to determine the exact time of death.
He also campaigned to use the bodies of death-row inmates for medical
experimentation.
And then, facing the sorrowful faces of terminally ill patients as a
pathology intern, he became convinced that there was a place in the
medical profession for euthanasia.
“Euthanasia wasn’t of much interest to me until my internship year,
when I saw first hand how cancer can ravage the body,” he wrote in his
1993 book “Prescription Medicine: The Goodness of Planned Death.” “The
patient was a helplessly immobile woman of middle age, her entire body
jaundiced to an intense yellow-brown, skin stretched paper thin over a
fluid-filled abdomen swollen to four or five times normal size.”
His life after this was devoted to the cause. Dr. Kevorkian, who lived
alone in a small apartment in Michigan, never married and had no
children. The people most closely associated with him were his defense
attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who represented him without a fee; and one
of his faithful, longtime assistants, Janet Good.
When, on one occasion, Good backed out of letting Dr. Kevorkian use
her home for an assisted suicide, he temporarily turned his back on
her.
To help a patient commit suicide, Dr. Kevorkian often used a homemade
machine that sent a saline drip into the person’s arm. When ready to
die, the patient could press a button that would trigger the release
of a potent chemical that would bring sleep. One minute later, a timer
on the machine would send a dose of potassium chloride into the
patient’s body, causing the heart to stop.
Dr. Kevorkian faced trial four times in Michigan for his actions but
was acquitted in three instances because of then-unclear laws on
whether physician-assisted suicide was illegal. His fourth trial was
declared a mistrial.
Unlike Michigan, most states do not have explicit laws banning
physician-assisted suicide, and nearly always, Dr. Kevorkian was
careful not to administer the fatal medication himself, although it
was his hope that within his lifetime, the law would allow him to do
so. He was thus able to escape jail for a long time.
But after he recorded his assistance in the death of Thomas Youk and
allowed the recording to be aired on “60 Minutes” in 1998, Dr.
Kevorkian was arrested and convicted of second-degree murder in
Michigan.
Youk, who was in the final stages of ALS, known as Lou Gehrig’s
disease, was too ill to administer the drugs himself, so Dr. Kevorkian
had done it for him.
During the trial, Dr. Kevorkian vehemently denied any wrongdoing.
“He calls it a murder, a crime, a killing,” Dr. Kevorkian said,
referring to the prosecutor. “I call it medical science. Tom Youk
didn’t come to me saying, ‘I want to die, kill me.’ He said, ‘Please
help me.’ There was medical affliction. Medical service is exempt from
certain laws.”
Dr. Kevorkian was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison but was
paroled in June 2007 for good behavior after promising not to assist
in any more suicides.
“It’s got to be legalized. That’s the point,” he told a Detroit TV
reporter shortly after his release from prison. “I’ll work to have it
legalized. But I won’t break any laws doing it.”
Ultimately, Dr. Kevorkian said his belief regarding a patient’s right
to die had a simple premise: It was in the Constitution, unwritten but
guaranteed by the Ninth Amendment, which states that Americans are not
excluded from rights that are not specifically enumerated in the
Constitution.
“There have been many constitutional scholars over time that have
believed that the Ninth Amendment deserves more respect, but Dr.
Kevorkian took it further than most lawyers and most constitutional
scholars would take it,” said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard professor and
lawyer who was an adviser in several of Dr. Kevorkian’s legal battles,
and corresponded with him while he was in prison.
“He was part of the civil rights movement – although he did it in his
own way,” Dershowitz said. “He didn’t lead marches, he didn’t get
other people to follow him, instead he put his own body in the line of
fire, and there are not many people who would do that. In the years
that come, his views may become more mainstream.”