Jack Kevorkian, assisted suicide advocate, dies

Updated at 11:35 a.m. ET

DETROIT - Jack Kevorkian, the audacious, fearless doctor who spurred on the national right-to-die debate with a homemade suicide machine that helped end the lives of dozens of ailing people, died Friday at a Detroit-area hospital after a brief illness. He was 83.

Kevorkian died about 2:30 a.m. at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, close friend and prominent attorney Mayer Morganroth said. He had been hospitalized since last month with pneumonia and kidney problems.

The retired pathologist, who said he injected lethal drugs that helped some 130 people die during the 1990s, likened himself to Martin Luther King and Gandhi and called prosecutors Nazis, his critics religious fanatics. He burned state orders against him, showed up at court in costume, called doctors who didn't support him "hypocritic oafs" and challenged authorities to stop him or make his actions legal.

(In 2007, Jack Kevorkian gave his first interview after his release from prison to "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace.)

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"The issue's got to be raised to the level where it is finally decided," Kevorkian said during a broadcast of CBS' "60 Minutes" that aired a Lou Gehrig's disease patient's videotaped 1998 death as Kevorkian challenged prosecutors to charge him in the case that eventually sent him to prison.

Experts credit Kevorkian, who insisted that people had the right to have a medical professional help them die, with publicizing physician-assisted suicide. Even so, few states made it legal. Laws went into effect in Oregon in 1997 and Washington state in 2009, and a 2009 Montana Supreme Court ruling effectively legalized the practice in that state.

"Somebody has to do something for suffering humanity," Kevorkian once said. "I put myself in my patients' place. This is something I would want."

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People who died with Kevorkian's help suffered from cancer, Lou Gehrig's disease, multiple sclerosis, paralysis. They died in their homes, an office, a Detroit island park, a remote cabin, the back of Kevorkian's van.

An official cause of death for Kevorkian was not immediately determined, but Morganroth said it likely will be pulmonary thrombosis, a blood clot.

"I had seen him earlier and he was conscious," said Morganroth, who added that the two spoke about Kevorkian's pending release from the hospital and planned start of rehabilitation. "Then I left and he took a turn for the worst and I went back."

Nurses played recordings of classical music by composer Johann Sebastian Bach for Kevorkian before he died, Morganroth said.

Nicknamed "Dr. Death," Kevorkian catapulted into public consciousness in 1990 when he used his homemade "suicide machine" in his rusted Volkswagen van to inject lethal drugs into an Alzheimer's patient who sought his help in dying.

For nearly a decade, he escaped authorities' efforts to stop him. His first four trials, all on assisted suicide charges, resulted in three acquittals and one mistrial.

(At left, watch "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace interview Jack Kevorkian in 2007 after his release from prison.)

Murder charges in earlier cases were thrown out because Michigan at the time had no law against assisted suicide; the Legislature wrote one in response to Kevorkian. He also was stripped of his medical license.

Devotees filled courtrooms wearing "I Back Jack" buttons. But critics questioned his publicity-grabbing methods, aided by his flamboyant attorney Geoffrey Fieger until the two parted ways before the 1999 trial in which he was convicted of second-degree murder.

"I think Kevorkian played an enormous role in bringing the physician-assisted suicide debate to the forefront," Susan Wolf, a professor of law and medicine at University of Minnesota Law School, said in 2000.

"It sometimes takes a very outrageous individual to put an issue on the public agenda," she said, and the debate he engendered "in a way cleared public space for more reasonable voices to come in."

In a rare televised interview from prison in 2005, Kevorkian told MSNBC he regretted "a little" the actions that put him there.

"It was disappointing because what I did turned out to be in vain. ... And my only regret was not having done it through the legal system, through legislation, possibly," he said.

Kevorkian's ultimate goal was to establish "obitoriums" where people would go to die. Doctors there could harvest organs and perform medical experiments during the suicide process. Such experiments would be "entirely ethical spinoffs" of suicide, he wrote in his 1991 book "Prescription: Medicide -- The Goodness of Planned Death."

His road to prison began in September 1998, when he videotaped himself injecting Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old Lou Gehrig's disease patient, with lethal drugs. He gave the tape to "60 Minutes."

(At left, watch the tape Jack Kevorkian provided to "60 Minutes." Please note that the video might offend some viewers.)

Two months later, a national television audience watched Youk die and heard Kevorkian say of authorities: "I've got to force them to act." Prosecutors quickly responded with a first-degree murder charge.

Kevorkian acted as his own attorney for most of the trial. He told the court his actions were "a medical service for an agonized human being."

In his closing argument, Kevorkian told jurors that some acts "by sheer common sense are not crimes."

"Just look at me," he said. "Honestly now, do you see a criminal? Do you see a murderer?"

The U.S. Supreme Court twice turned back appeals from Kevorkian, in 2002, when he argued that his prosecution was unconstitutional, and in 2004, when he claimed he had ineffective representation.

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[thejoker12]

When an animal is dying and is suffering horribly we put them to sleep. It is the humane thing to do. When a human is dying and suffering, the kind of suffering that meds can't alieviate, we keep them alive as long as we can. We keep them alive on machines preventing them from being with GOD. We don't care about their pain in light of our own emotional pain of saying goodbye.
Kevorkian wasn't evil. He was humane. Humane is something some of you aren't. Hospitals don't dope patients up enough for relief Hospice does.

[shameonbush]

Kevorkian was a psychopath. This country is so much safer without him.

[hasimi1985]

Very controversial person. RIP

[baileyccc]

I always supported Dr. Kevorkian. There is no need for so much suffering and misery for the sick person as well as their family. Medical greed was against this for the sole reason to bilk Medicare.

[senca67]

Why didn't he take his own way out. He was a coward.

[realtimecoffee]

He didn't feel the need. It's a voluntary personal choice, not a political statement or some stupid macho game.

[decotoguy]

Dr. Jack Kevorkian is my HERO.

[amulette]

R.I.P. Jack

[boiler_tech]

I add my R.I.P tribute to Jack Kevorkian. Fortunately, I have never had to confront the issues as those that sought him out, but I would want that end of life option. Here was a person that sought neither fame nor fortune in helping others with their difficult decisions.

He saw the need after a productive career enlightened him to the suffering in some terminally ill.

He was an honorable man.

[wlhoppers]

Beautiful.

[skeezix06]

You all better take another look around. The most recent alternative to Kevorkian is the Paul Ryan Medicare plan.

[littleredtop]

This poor man was persecuted by our corrupt and twisted system for years and all he ever did was help terminally ill people end their suffering and pain. The American medical machine, aided by political and legal buffoons, is designed to milk every last drop of cash from its victims. What Jack was doing could have disrupted hundreds of billions in annual cash flow. Jack was a hero who unfortunately hasn't been replaced. May he rest in peace.

[saturn05]

Oregon has followed in Jack's compassion. We have a death with dignity law. I am glad we had him around to raise this issue.

[nolalou]

When Obama tried to include 'end of life' counseling for medicare patients so they could make their wishes known, the GOP called it Death Panels!

[PrideInCountry]

My father died of cancer 2 years ago, in Oregon. My sister and I were with him and "assisted." It was in stark contrast to my mother's death from cancer, also in Oregon, but in 1874.

Thank you, Jack. R.I.P.