Ian Dowbiggin, PhD, Professor of History at the University of Prince Edward Island, in his 2003 book A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America, explained:
"On Sunday night, November 22, 1998, viewers of the CBS television program 60 Minutes watched in horror as Dr. Jack Kevorkian killed fifty-two-year-old Thomas Youk. Youk, suffering from...Lou Gehrig's disease, had asked Kevorkian to end his life, and Kevorkian complied by injecting him with poison to stop his heart.
Youk was not the first person Kevorkian had helped to die, but he was likely the last. In 1999, the seventy-year-old Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to jail for ten to twenty-five years.
What Kevorkian had done was deliberately...hasten another person's death, an act of active 'euthanasia'... Acquitted of the charge of assisting suicide by three juries in the 1990s, Kevorkian crossed the line in 1998 by not only administering the lethal injection but also videotaping Youk's death and defying prosecutors to charge him."
Wesley Smith, JD, anti-euthanasia activist, in his 1997 book Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope From Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder, argued:
"Let us remind ourselves why Jack Kevorkian must be stopped. There were at least forty-five of them, at last count, forty-five dead people. A minority of them were dying, but few would have been likely to succumb soon (approximately 20 percent were diagnosed with a terminal illness). As Stephanie Gutmann pointed out in The New Republic, more than two thirds were women, most of whom were 'not complaining of severe or constant pain'; rather, 'most [were] worried about the disease's impact on others.' In other words, many of the women willing to allow Kevorkian to hook them up to his carbon monoxide canister or other suicide machine were doing so to relieve other people as much as themselves. Others who were 'Kevorkianed' were disabled, depressed, afraid of future suffering, were receiving inadequate pain-control medication or refusing to take pain medication, had been abandoned by their own doctors and/or families, or were affected by a combination of these and other factors.
Whether dying, chronically ill, disabled, or depressed, each one of Kevorkian's 'subjects' (his term) deserved better than to end life as a showcase in Kevorkian's one-man death circus."
The Washington Post, in a Mar. 30, 1999 editorial entitled "Convicting Dr. Death," commented:
The facts of the case
were never in dispute... Dr. Kevorkian administered a lethal dose of
drugs to Thomas Youk, who had Lou Gehrig's disease. In past cases, Dr.
Kevorkian had been accused merely of arranging for those who wished to
die to take their own lives. This time, however, Dr. Kevorkian's role
was far more active. Put simply, he killed Mr. Youk.
However disturbing Dr.
Kevorkian's previous efforts have been, his killing of Mr. Youk crossed
a line. This was the crudest kind of euthanasia, and to have treated it
as less than wholly criminal would have been to sign off on the least
accountable type of 'mercy killing.' Fortunately, a jury has finally
drawn a line.
Mark O'Brien, a freelance writer and quadriplegic, wrote in an Oct. 9, 1996 commentary for the Pacific News Service titled "A High Quad Answers Kevorkian's 'Quality of Life' Theory" that:
"There's a killer on the loose. He doesn't kill boys as did John Wayne Gacy. That would get him into trouble.
He doesn't kill women as did Ted Bundy. That would get him into trouble. He kills disabled people.
Perhaps it's appropriate that killers specialize these days. Healers have been specializing for years. And by limiting his killing to disabled people, Dr. Jack Kevorkian stays out of jail.
If he'd chosen another specialty, it is likely he would now reside in one of the less comfortable places in the Michigan correctional system. He might even be dead...
His main interest, nay, his obsession, is killing disabled people or people who say they are disabled.
This mostly cashes out to mean depressed middle-aged women."
Rita Marker, JD, Executive Director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, argued in her 1999 article for the Human Life Review entitled "Prisoner Number 284797":
"More than 15 million households watched as Jack Kevorkian ended the life of Thomas Youk...
Youk was shown sitting in his wheelchair, depressed, hopeless, and, as Kevorkian described him, 'terrified of choking--terrified.'
Throughout the videotape it was evident that Kevorkian was in charge of the situation. It was Kevorkian, not Youk, who decided that death should take place by lethal injection, rather than assisted suicide...
The 'more reliable and more humane' method that Kevorkian chose was a bit trickier than the unlicensed physician had indicated. Kevorkian made a number of attempts to insert the needle. After many unsuccessful jabs, he finally inserted it between two of the fingers of Youk's right hand. Then, talking at Youk, he announced:'And we're ready to inject! We're going to inject in your right arm. OK? Okey-doke'...
Within a time span of less than 48 hours, Jack Kevorkian had met Thomas Youk for the first time, and had killed him with a lethal injection. And all of it was captured on video, taped by the murderer...
Kevorkian had asked jurors to look at him and determine whether they saw a murderer.
The jury did just that... His guilt was never in question...
After riding a publicity high in the international media, Jack Kevorkian is now where he belongs. In prison. Convicted of murder. Known by a number, not a name."
Jack Kevorkian, MD, Euthanasia practitioner, told New York Times reporter Jack Lessenberry on May 15, 1996, after news of his acquittal in the assisted suicides of two women:
"What this proves is that while this may be a sin to you...one thing is clear: For any enlightened human being, this can never be a crime."
"[My only intent was] to relieve their pain and suffering... Their death was just an unfortunate but necessary consequence of the only way that could be done."
Jack Kevorkian, also delivered a 1994 speech titled "A Modern Inquisition" upon receiving the Humanist Hero Award from the American Humanist Association, during which he commented:
"I don't regret the position I'm in. I am not a hero, either--by my definition, anyway. To me, anyone who does what should be done is not a hero. Heroes to me are very, very rare. And I still feel that I'm only doing what I, as a physician, should do. A license has nothing to do with it; I am a physician and therefore I will act like a physician whenever I can. That doesn't mean that I'm more compassionate than anyone else, but there is one thing I am that many aren't and that's honest. "
Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, commented on Kevorkian's conviction on the Final Exit website (accessed Apr. 8, 2006), that:
"The severity of the sentence on Kevorkian will drive the practice of voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide even further underground. It will not stop it. Kevorkian is by no means the only doctor who helps people die--just the one who does so and also openly campaigns for societal acceptance of the practice.
Kevorkian's martyrdom--self-imposed as it is--will speed up the day when voluntary euthanasia for the dying is removed from the legal classification of 'murder' and recognized as a justifiable act of compassion."
Mike Wallace, correspondent for CBS 60 Minutes, on Nov. 24, 1998, told PBS's NewsHour:
"I
began to understand the compassion...felt by Dr. Kevorkian for this man
[Thomas Youk]--who...is choking on his own saliva, in pain--couldn't
use his arms, couldn't use his leg. He had not been treated properly,
he felt by his own doctor...he had been working with hospice people as
well. The time finally came when he, his brother, another brother, his
mother, and his wife decided this [euthanasia] was a good idea...
They wrote to Kevorkian.
Kevorkian came to see him, interviewed him at length, got him to sign a
document saying that he gave permission, and then Kevorkian said, Now
I'll go away for a month and I'll come back after a month and
see...finally they decided on a week. The following night--the
following night Dr. Kevorkian was called by the brother and said,
please, get over to the house now, he wants to go now."
Mike Wallace also stated in a May 18, 2006 interview with Peter Johnson on USA Today, that:
"He's [Kevorkian is] a decent and compassionate man who tried to help
people get out of the suffering of their lives... [Kevorkian's
incarceration] amounts to cruel and unusual punishment."
Faye Girsh, Senior Advisor to Final Exit Network, told the Detroit News in a Mar. 28, 1999 article titled "Kevorkian Verdict Stirs Issue: Some Right-to-Die Advocates Call Retired Pathologist a Martyr":
"He's
[Jack Kevorkian is] a martyr... He's acted in a great American
tradition of civil disobedience. It was so clearly not a crime."
Faye Girsh later wrote in a 2001 article titled "How Shall We Die" that appeared in Free Inquiry magazine:
"At the Hemlock Society we get calls daily from desperate people who are looking for someone like Jack Kevorkian to end their lives which have lost all quality. Dr. Kevorkian is serving ten to twenty-five years in prison for acceding, publicly to such a request--a request many doctors fulfill in private... Americans should enjoy a right guaranteed in the European Declaration of Human Rights--the right not to be forced to suffer. It should be considered as much of a crime to make someone live who with justification does not wish to continue as it is to take life without consent."
David Gorosh, JD, spoke on behalf of Dr. Kevorkian as his attorney, telling Court TV reporters on Mar. 26, 1999:
"We obviously disagree with the verdict. It seems hard to belive that we can equate an act of compassion with murder... It's too bad that the most important people in this case, Melody and Terrence Youk [relatives of Dr. Kevorkian's patient Thomas Youk], were not involved in the trial. This is a tragedy... he had no evil intent."
Gorosh, on Mar. 20, 1999, told New York Times reporters:
"Thomas
Youk, death was inevitable for him... But he didn't want to die. He
simply asked Dr. Kevorkian to help him ease his suffering, end his pain
if he could. When you ask a jury is this murder, when you think of what
is murder, this is not it."
Gorosh, on Mar. 16, 1999, told the Oakland Free Press:
"How
many other murder cases have you heard in your life, in the history of
the United States, where the 'so-called' victim's family embraces the
defendant and calls him an 'angel of mercy?'"
