The New York Times
June 4, 2011 Saturday
Late Edition – Final
Doctor Who Helped End Lives
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the medical pathologist who willfully helped
dozens of terminally ill people end their lives, becoming the central
figure in a national drama surrounding assisted suicide, died on
Friday in Royal Oak., Mich. He was 83.
He died at William Beaumont Hospital, where he had been admitted
recently with kidney and respiratory problems, said Geoffrey N.
Fieger, the lawyer who represented Dr. Kevorkian in several of his
trials in the 1990s.
Mayer Morganroth, a friend and lawyer, told The Associated Press that
the official cause of death would most likely be pulmonary thrombosis,
a blood clot.
In arguing for the right of the terminally ill to choose how they die,
Dr. Kevorkian challenged social taboos about disease and dying while
defying prosecutors and the courts. He spent eight years in prison
after being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the last
of about 130 ailing patients whose lives he had helped end, beginning
in 1990.
Originally sentenced in 1999 to 10 to 25 years in a maximum security
prison, he was released after assuring the authorities that he would
never conduct another assisted suicide.
His critics were as impassioned as his supporters, but all generally
agreed that his stubborn and often intemperate advocacy of assisted
suicide helped spur the growth of hospice care in the United States
and made many doctors more sympathetic to those in severe pain and
more willing to prescribe medication to relieve it.
In Oregon, where a schoolteacher had become Dr. Kevorkian’s first
assisted suicide patient, state lawmakers in 1997 approved a statute
making it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal medications to help
terminally ill patients end their lives. In 2006 the United States
Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that found that Oregon’s
Death With Dignity Act protected assisted suicide as a legitimate
medical practice.
During the period that Oregon was considering its law, Dr. Kevorkian’s
confrontational strategy gained wide publicity, which he actively
sought. National magazines put his picture on their covers, and he
drew the attention of television programs like ”60 Minutes.” His
nickname, Dr. Death, and his self-made suicide machine, which he
variously called the ”Mercitron” or the ”Thanatron,” became fodder
for late-night television comedians.
In 2010 his story was dramatized in the HBO movie ”You Don’t Know
Jack,” starring Al Pacino as Dr. Kevorkian. Mr. Pacino received Emmy
and Golden Globe awards for his performance. In his Emmy acceptance
speech, he said he had been gratified to ”try to portray someone as
brilliant and interesting and unique” as Dr. Kevorkian. Dr.
Kevorkian, who was in the audience, smiled in appreciation.
Given his obdurate public persona and his delight in flaying medical
critics as ”hypocritical oafs,” Dr. Kevorkian invited and reveled in
the public’s attention, regardless of its sting.
The American Medical Association in 1995 called him ”a reckless
instrument of death” who ”poses a great threat to the public.”
Diane Coleman, the founder of Not Dead Yet, which describes itself as
a disability-rights advocacy group and that once picketed Dr.
Kevorkian’s home in Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb, attacked his
approach. ”It’s the ultimate form of discrimination to offer people
with disabilities help to die,” she said, ”without having offered
real options to live.”
But Jack Lessenberry, a prominent Michigan journalist who covered Dr.
Kevorkian’s one-man campaign, wrote in The Detroit Metro Times: ”Jack
Kevorkian, faults and all, was a major force for good in this society.
He forced us to pay attention to one of the biggest elephants in
society’s living room: the fact that today vast numbers of people are
alive who would rather be dead, who have lives not worth living.”
In the late 1980s, after an undistinguished career in medicine and an
unsuccessful try at a career in the arts, Dr. Kevorkian rediscovered a
fascination with death that he had developed during his early years in
medicine, only now his interest in it was not as a private event but
as a matter of public policy.
As a student at the University of Michigan Medical School, from which
he graduated in 1952, and later as a resident at the University of
Michigan Medical Center, Dr. Kevorkian proposed giving murderers
condemned to die the option of being executed with anesthesia in order
to subject their bodies to medical experimentation and allow the
harvesting of their healthy organs. He delivered a paper on the
subject to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science in 1958.
Gaining Attention
In the 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Kevorkian shelved his quixotic campaign to
engage death for social purposes and pursued a largely itinerant
career as a medical pathologist. Though his friends described him as
funny, witty, personable and engaging in private, those he met in work
and social situations portrayed him as awkward, grim, driven, quick to
anger and unpredictable.
Fiercely principled and equally inflexible, he rarely dated and never
married. He lived a penurious life, eating little, avoiding luxury and
dressing in threadbare clothing that he often bought at the Salvation
Army. In 1976, bored with medicine, he moved to Long Beach, Calif.,
where he spent 12 years painting and writing, producing an
unsuccessful film about Handel’s ”Messiah,” and supporting himself
with part-time pathology positions at two hospitals.
In 1984, prompted by the growing number of executions in the United
States, Dr. Kevorkian revisited his idea of giving death row inmates a
choice. He was invited to brief members of the California Legislature
on a bill that would enable prisoners to donate their organs and die
by anesthesia instead of poison gas or the electric chair.
The experience was a turning point. Energized by the attention of
lawmakers and the news media, he became involved in the growing
national debate on dying with dignity. In 1987 he visited the
Netherlands, where he studied techniques that allowed Dutch physicians
to assist in the suicides of terminally ill patients without
interference from the legal authorities.
A year later, he returned to Michigan and began advertising in
Detroit-area newspapers for a new medical practice in what he called
”bioethics and obiatry,” which would offer patients and their
families ”death counseling.” He made reporters aware of his
intentions, explaining that he did not charge for his services and
bore all the expenses of euthanasia himself. He showed journalists the
simple metal frame from which he suspended vials of drugs —
thiopental, a sedative, and potassium chloride, which paralyzed the
heart — that allowed patients to end their own lives.
First Patient
He also talked about the ”doctrine” he had developed to achieve two
goals: ensuring the patient’s comfort and protecting himself against
criminal conviction. He required patients to express clearly a wish to
die. Family physicians and mental health professionals were consulted.
Patients were given at least a month to consider their decision and
possibly change their minds. Dr. Kevorkian videotaped interviews with
patients, their families and their friends, and he videotaped the
suicides, which he called medicides.
On June 4, 1990, Janet Adkins, an Oregon teacher who suffered from
Alzheimer’s disease, was the first patient to avail herself of Dr.
Kevorkian’s assistance. Mrs. Adkins’s life ended on the bed inside Dr.
Kevorkian’s rusting 1968 Volkswagen van, which was parked in a
campground near his home.
Immediately afterward Dr. Kevorkian called the police, who arrested
and briefly detained him. The next day Ron Adkins, her husband, and
two of his sons held a news conference in Portland and read the
suicide note Mrs. Adkins had prepared. In an interview with The New
York Times that day, Dr. Kevorkian alerted the nation to his campaign.
”My ultimate aim is to make euthanasia a positive experience,” he
said. ”I’m trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its
responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their
patients with death.”
By his account, he assisted in some 130 suicides over the next eight
years. Patients from across the country traveled to the Detroit region
to seek his help. Sometimes the procedure was done in homes, cars and
campgrounds.
Prosecutors, jurists, the State Legislature, the Michigan health
authorities and Gov. John Engler seemed helpless to stop him, though
they spent years trying. In 1991 a state judge, Alice Gilbert, issued
a permanent injunction barring Dr. Kevorkian from using his suicide
machine. The same year, the state suspended his license to practice
medicine. In 1993, Michigan approved a statute outlawing assisted
suicide. The statute was declared unlawful by a state judge and the
state Court of Appeals, but in 1994 the Michigan Supreme Court ruled
that assisting in a suicide, while not specifically prohibited by
statute, was a common-law felony and that there was no protected right
to suicide assistance under the state Constitution.
None of the legal restrictions seemed to matter to Dr. Kevorkian.
Several times he assisted in patient suicides just hours after being
released from custody for helping in a previous one. After one arrest
in 1993 he refused to post bond, and a day later he said he was on a
hunger strike. During another arrest he fought with police officers
and seemed to invite the opportunity to be jailed.
He liked the attention. At the start of his third trial, on April 1,
1996, he showed up in court wearing Colonial-era clothing to show how
antiquated he thought the charges were.
>From May 1994 to June 1997, Dr. Kevorkian stood trial four times in
the deaths of six patients. With the help of his young and flamboyant
defense lawyer, Mr. Fieger, three of those trials ended in acquittals,
and the fourth was declared a mistrial.
Mr. Fieger based his winning defense on the compassion and mercy that
he said Dr. Kevorkian had shown his patients. Prosecutors felt
differently. ”He’s basically thumbed his nose at law enforcement, in
part because he feels he has public support,” Richard Thompson, the
prosecutor in Oakland County, Mich., told Time magazine in 1993.
But on March 26, 1999, after a trial that lasted less than two days, a
Michigan jury found Dr. Kevorkian guilty of second-degree murder. That
trial came six months after Dr. Kevorkian had videotaped himself
injecting Thomas Youk, a patient suffering from amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), with the lethal drugs that caused
Mr. Youk’s death on Sept. 17, 1998.
Dr. Kevorkian sent the videotape to ”60 Minutes,” which broadcast it
on Nov. 22. The tape showed Dr. Kevorkian going well beyond assisting
a patient in causing his own death by performing the injection
himself. The program portrayed him as a zealot with an agenda. ”They
must charge me; either they go or I go,” he told Mike Wallace. ”If
they go, that means they’ll never convict me in a court of law.” The
broadcast, which prompted a national debate about medical ethics and
media responsibility, also served as prime evidence for a first-degree
murder charge brought by the Oakland County prosecutor’s office. In a
departure from his previous trials, Dr. Kevorkian ignored Mr. Fieger’s
advice and defended himself — and not at all well. It was an act of
arrogance he regretted, he said later.
‘Stopped’
”You had the audacity to go on national television, show the world
what you did and dare the legal system to stop you,” said Judge
Jessica R. Cooper, who presided over the trial in Oakland County
Circuit Court. ”Well, sir, consider yourself stopped.”
On June 1, 2007, Dr. Kevorkian was released from prison after he
promised not to conduct another assisted suicide.
He was born Murad Kevorkian in Pontiac, Mich., on May 26, 1928, the
second of three children and the only son born to Levon and Satenig
Kevorkian, Armenian refugees. His father founded and owned a small
excavation company.
The young Jack Kevorkian was described by his friends as an able
student interested in art and music. He graduated from the University
of Michigan, where he pursued a degree in engineering before switching
to medicine.
He was the author of four books, including ”Prescription: Medicide,
the Goodness of Planned Death” (Prometheus, 1991). He is survived by
his sister, Flora Holzheimer. Another sister, Margo Janus, died in
1994.
Mr. Fieger said that Dr. Kevorkian, weakened as he lay in the
hospital, could not take advantage of the option that he had offered
others and that he had wished for himself. ”This is something I would
want,” Dr. Kevorkian once said.
”If he had enough strength to do something about it, he would have,”
Mr. Fieger said at a news conference Friday in Southfield, Mich. ”Had
he been able to go home, Jack Kevorkian probably would not have
allowed himself to go back to the hospital.”
Dr. Kevorkian was a lover of classical music, and before he died, his
friend Mr. Morganroth said, nurses played recordings of Bach for him
in his room.