Murad Jacob "Jack" Kevorkian (May 26, 1928 – June 3, 2011) was an Armenian-American pathologist and euthanasia proponent. He publicly championed a terminal patient's right to die by physician-assisted suicide, embodied in his quote, "Dying is not a crime". Kevorkian said that he assisted at least 130 patients to that end. He was convicted of murder in 1999 and was often portrayed in the media with the name of "Dr. Death".
In 1998, Kevorkian was arrested and tried for his role in the voluntary euthanasia of a man named Thomas Youk who had Lou Gehrig's disease, or ALS. He was convicted of second-degree murder and served eight years of a 10-to-25-year prison sentence. He was released on parole on June 1, 2007, on condition he would not offer advice about, participate in, or be present at the act of any type of euthanasia to any other person, nor that he promote or talk about the procedure of assisted suicide.
Early life and education
Kevorkian was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on May 26, 1928, to Armenian immigrants from the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey). His father, Levon (1891–1960), was born in the village of Passen, near Erzurum, and his mother, Satenig (1900–1968), was born in the village of Govdun, near Sivas. His father left Ottoman Armenia and made his way to Pontiac in 1912, where he found work at an automobile foundry. Satenig fled the Armenian genocide of 1915, finding refuge with relatives in Paris and eventually reuniting with her brother in Pontiac. Levon and Satenig met through the Armenian community in their city, where they married and began their family. The couple had a daughter, Margaret, in 1926, followed by son Murad, and their third and last child, Flora.
When Kevorkian was a child, his parents took him to an Orthodox church weekly. He started questioning the existence of a God, as he believed an all-knowing God would have prevented the Armenian Genocide on his extended family. He stopped attending church by the time he was 12.
Kevorkian was a child prodigy, teaching himself multiple languages (including German, Russian, Greek, and Japanese). As such, he was often alienated by his peers. Kevorkian graduated from Pontiac Central High School with honors in 1945, at the age of 17. In 1952, he graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.
Kevorkian completed residency training in anatomical and clinical pathology and briefly conducted research on blood transfusion.
Career
Over a period of decades, Kevorkian developed several controversial ideas related to death. In a 1959 journal article, he wrote:
Senior doctors at the University of Michigan, Kevorkian's employer, opposed his proposal and Kevorkian chose to leave the university rather than stop advocating his ideas. Ultimately, he gained little support for his plan. He returned to the idea of using death-row inmates for medical purposes after the Supreme Court's 1976 decision in Gregg v. Georgia reinstituted the death penalty. He advocated harvesting the organs from inmates after the death penalty was carried out for transplant into sick patients, but he failed to gain the cooperation of prison officials.
As a pathologist at Pontiac General Hospital, Kevorkian experimented with transfusing blood from the recently deceased into live patients. He drew blood from corpses recently brought into the hospital and transferred it successfully into the bodies of hospital staff members. Kevorkian thought that the U.S. military might be interested in using this technique to help wounded soldiers during a battle, but the Pentagon was not interested.
In the 1980s, Kevorkian wrote a series of articles for the German journal Medicine and Law that laid out his thinking on the ethics of euthanasia.
In 1987, Kevorkian started advertising in Detroit newspapers as a physician consultant for "death counseling". His first public assisted suicide, of Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old woman diagnosed in 1989 with Alzheimer's disease, took place in 1990. Charges of murder were dropped on December 13, 1990, as there were, at that time, no laws in Michigan regarding assisted suicide. In 1991, however, the State of Michigan revoked Kevorkian's medical license and made it clear that, given his actions, he was no longer permitted to practice medicine or to work with patients.