LANSING, Michigan (AP) — After more than eight years in prison, a frail Dr. Jack Kevorkian will be paroled in June with a promise that he won’t assist in any more suicides, a prison spokesman said Wednesday.
Leo Lalonde, the corrections spokesman, would not provide further details.
Kevorkian, once the nation’s most vocal advocate of assisted suicide for the terminally ill, is serving a 10- to 25-year sentence for second-degree murder in the 1998 poisoning of Thomas Youk, 52, Oakland County man with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Michigan banned assisted suicide in 1998.
Youk’s death was videotaped and shown on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
Kevorkian, who claimed to have assisted in at least 130 deaths in the 1990s, called it a mercy killing.
Mayer Morganroth, Kevorkian’s attorney, said this summer that Kevorkian, now 78, was suffering from hepatitis C and diabetes, that his weight had dropped to 113 pounds and that he had less than a year to live.
But will he live long enough to reach his parole date?
Overdue. Not that any xhristians will care.
Overdue.
He’s a hero. Too bad he’s in poor health and won’t be able to campaign for dignity and individual freedoms.
I don’t see why people give this dude a hard time. These people are verbally asking to die. It’s not like he goes in there and pulls the plug against their will or cannibalizes on limbs like a serial killer. jeesh
Maybe you guys could be heros, too, and put the old fart out of his misery.
There are some right wingers I’d like to put out of my misery. đ
#1 – Agreed.
#1, 2, 3, & 5,
Yup, I agree.
#4, still trolling
You all don’t have a clue. He deserve to stay.
#8 –
Your point is well written and well supported. You have convinced me. I shall change my position that the those suffering in excrusiating pain deserve to end their life with dignity and replace it with your position that no matter how horrifying and traumatic the pain of a terminal illness is, we should prolong that agony indefinately because… because…
sorry… why are we stepping on the rights of the terminally ill again?
}}#1, 2, 3, & 5,
Yup, I agree.
#4, still trolling
————
So, you agree with their assessment and not mine? You do know that my stance is the same as those you agree with, right? Maybe you don’t know what you agree on unless it’s worded for you properly.
#11,
I think a post was deleted, and the #4, still trolling comment was directed at the comment that ended up being deleted…
Poor old guy. I hope if he’s feeling bad enough he has the guts to kill himself.
Sorry, but I don’t think he should have ever gone to prison in the first place. I’m glad he’s getting out. Too bad the people that put him there in the first place aren’t going in.
#10 & 11,
I apologize.
I meant to write I agree with #1, 2, 3, & 4 and accuse #5 of trolling.
I hope Greg #12, is right about what happened. Regardless, I fully support what Dr. Kevorkian has done and any physician who thinks enough of their patient to help them.
Mr. Fusion, #15, you didn’t screw up. Last night, when I was going through the messages captured by the spam filter, I found several legitimate messages which I then approved. One of them turned out to be “#1” above, which bumped the other messages down. So your number identification was correct at the time you typed it.
(I didn’t catch it until now, else I would have done something to keep the sequence intact and avoid confusion. Apologies are mine.)
Poor Doctor Death.
Never knock on Death’s door.
Ring the bell and run away. Death hates that.
Kervorkian’s real message, that a person has the right to choose a dignified and peaceful death, was, and is, worthy of reasoned debate. Unfortunately Dr. Kervorkian’s persona isn’t a very likable. I wonder if he was more like, oh, Dr. Mark Greene and less like Dr. Greg House he would have had enough public support to avoid prison altogether.
#20 – It seems to take a certain personality bend to want to get up on a high horse and make an issue of something that has happened quietly in the background. And a different personality type, bent toward controlling others instead of toward granting others liberty, inevitably gets upset and starts to beat the drums about The Awful Things That Are Happening To Our Beloved Country. The results are never pretty.
Think of Timothy Leary and his campaign for LSD, which had been around at least since the 1930s or 1940s, maybe longer. I’ve long wondered if we would all have many fewer liberty-sapping laws in the U.S. if he hadn’t chared in to make psychedelics a cause.
Kevorkian – same thing. He raised something doctors had done quietly for their patients for many years into a perfect cause for the Look How Awful It Is crowd to beat their drums about. With similar, clamp-down-on-liberty results.
Personally, I wish all those spotlight-seeking personalities would crank it back a few notches. Maybe if they ded, the Be Afraid! crowd would find it a little harder to attack personal liberty in th U.S.
I think the case that gave the good doctor the most problems was a patient he “helped out” who may have not have been mentally capable of making the decision to “off herself”. She was not suffering from a condition that could not have been treated; her “conditions” were rooted in being overweight.
Ironically, her husband worked in the mental health field. It has been theorized that this was his way of getting a divorce.
None of this hearsay was proven but has always been under suspicion. Suicide attempts are usually a cry for help as this may have been.
I’m pretty sure this is the case that pushed the Michigan legislation through to passage. It was as much precautionary as reactionary. This baited the trap he fell into later.
One very good thing Dr “K” did inspire — the debate in the medical community about pain management took center stage for a little while. The medical community who opposed Dr K was also found to be guilty of not paying enough attention to the severe pain and suffering their patients experience. More than a few of Dr. “K”‘s customers indicated they just wanted their pain to end.
#6 – Looks like God just put the Republicans back in charge of the Senate. He seems to disagree with you.
#15 – You should try explaining yourself more often. You never make sense the first time.
My only hope is that if I request to have “The Plug” pulled that there is someone there with the balls to do it.
You all seem to be debating this, and that’s pretty typical. Even at the time of Kevorkianâs conviction, the nation was divided on the issue — see the states here. Support for physician-assisted suicide has increased substantially over the past 50 years, and doctor-assisted suicide is now legal in Oregon. But surveys also find that results on this issue change depending on how the question is worded — a classic sign that people are still working through their views on a problem — find this info here.
[edited: pls use tinyurl]
#23, I’m interested, even if no one else is, of why you disagree with Kevorkian. I’m sure that if you really try, you might find an opinion.
You could say something like, âIt is wrong to killâ, or âNo one should play Godâ, or âI’m just a troll dip sheet out to rattle people’s chainsâ.