==
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
==
NY Times June 3, 2011
Dr. Jack Kevorkian Dies at 83; Backed Assisted Suicide
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the medical pathologist who helped dozens of
terminally ill people kill themselves, becoming the central figure
in a national drama surrounding assisted suicide, died on Friday
in a Detroit-area hospital. He was 83.
The cause was not immediately known, but local media reported that
he had suffered from kidney and respiratory problems and that his
condition had been worsening in recent days. His death, at William
Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., was confirmed by Geoffrey
Feiger, the lawyer who represented Dr. Kevorkian during several of
his trials in the 1990s.
Dr. Kevorkian challenged social taboos about disease and dying,
willfully defying prosecutors and the courts as he actively sought
national celebrity. He spent eight years in prison after being
convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the last of the
more than 100 terminally ill patients whose lives he helped end.
From June 1990, when he assisted in the first suicide, until
March 1999, when he was sentenced to serve 10 to 25 years in a
maximum security prison, Dr. Kevorkian was a controversial figure.
But his critics and supporters generally agree on this: As a
result of his stubborn and often intemperate advocacy for the
right of the terminally ill to choose how they die, hospice care
has boomed in the United States, and physicians have become more
sympathetic to their pain and more willing to prescribe medication
to relieve it.
In 1997, Oregon became the first state to enact a statute making
it legal for physicians 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 a legitimate medical practice.
During the nine years between the law’s passage and the court’s
ruling, Dr. Kevorkian’s confrontational strategy consumed
thousands of column inches in national newspapers, graced the
covers of national magazines and drew the attention of “60
Minutes” and other television news programs. 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.
His story became the subject of the 2010 HBO movie You Don’t Know
Jack. Al Pacino, who played Dr. Kevorkian in the movie, earned
Emmy and Golden Globe awards for his performance. In his Emmy
acceptance speech, Mr. Pacino said he had been gratified to “try
to portray someone as brilliant and interesting and unique as Dr.
Kevorkian and that it had been a pleasure to know him. Dr.
Kevorkian, who was in the audience, smiled in appreciation.
Given his obdurate public persona and his delight in flaying
medical critics as “hypocritic 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, a right-to-life
advocacy group 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 closely
covered Dr. Kevorkian’s one-man campaign, said: “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 the fascination with death, not as a private event
but as a focus of public policy, that had marked his early years
in medicine.
As a student at the University of Michigan Medical School, where
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.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Kevorkian shelved his quixotic
campaign to engage death for social purposes and pursued a largely
itinerant career as a
