June 3 is the tenth anniversary of the death of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, still a household name to many. At their request he helped130 people to die.
Beginning in June 1990, Kevorkian helped Alzheimer’s patient and Hemlock Society member Janet Adkins to die, using his Mercitron machine.
Kevorkian, despite three trials ending in acquittals, continued his version of physician-assisted suicide, first using this device which required barbiturates and, after losing his license, developing a patient-assisted mechanism to use carbon monoxide.
In 1997 he provided a lethal injection to Tom Youk, dying of ALS. The video of this was provided to Mike Wallace and shown to 60 million people on TV in November. Kevorkian insisted that he had to be charged with murder so that this issue could be decided by the Supreme Court.
He was charged and acted as his own legal counsel in March, 1998, at his trial where he was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 10 to 25 years . He was eligible for parole in 2007 and served two years on parole. His appeal did not reach the US Supreme Court.
Kevorkian died in hospital of natural causes on 3 June 2011, aged 83. Curiously, his name is currently public because he is named in the new movie NOMADLAND as the author of the guide book ‘Final Exit’. This is a mistake: the author Is Derek Humphry; both are famous names in the right-to-die field, thus the confusion.
