Jack Is Back

On Friday Dr. Jack Kevorkian "Dr. Death" as the media dubbed him, was released from the state prison in Coldwater, Michigan, after serving eight years for a second degree murder conviction. Dr. Kevorkian had videotaped himself administering lethal drugs to a 52 year old man who was suffering from the debilitating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
Dr. Kevorkian is now 79 and says he has assisted in some 130 deaths, but has said he will no longer assist in suicides as a condition of his parole.
He was escorted by police and did not say much to the media, except that he would soon begin a media blitz to support his cause.
The former pathologist, won international notoriety in the 1990s after presiding as a doctor in suicides and advocating the legalization of assisted suicide in the United States.
CBS reporter Mike Wallace, whose "60 Minutes" news show aired the death tape that became the central piece of evidence at Kevorkian's 1999 murder trial, was greeted by the newly released Kevorkian with a hug.
In an interview conducted on his way home to the Detroit area, Kevorkian told Wallace he would abide by the terms of his parole and limit his public speech about assisted suicide to an argument for its legalization.
He also said he promised his parole board he would turn away any terminally ill person seeking his advice on suicide.Kevorkian's release reignited a complicated debate involving medical ethics, religious views about the sanctity of life and the rights of suffering patients facing death.
About a dozen of his supporters lined a road to the prison under gray skies, holding hand-lettered signs, including, "Jack, Glad You're Back" and "Jack, We're Glad You're Out of the Box."
But the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, where Kevorkian presided over suicides in hotel rooms and the back of his rusty van, issued a statement condemning him.
Kevorkian had thwarted four attempts by prosecutors to convict him and flouted a Michigan ban on assisted suicide aimed at him. State regulators revoked his medical license in 1991.
But other U.S. advocates for assisted suicide have sought to distance their cause from Kevorkian after a decade of stalemate as they tried to push state-by-state legal changes.
In 1997, Oregon became the only U.S. state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Records show 292 such suicides under that law from 1998 through 2006.
Efforts to pass similar measures in other states including Michigan and Hawaii failed.
A bill modeled on the Oregon law is set to go to the California legislature next week in a move seen by all sides as the most important test of the issue in years.
I did not add any links as every news agency has either video of his release or full length stories, so I just tried to get the facts of his release and a few words about him.
I did not think that he should have been convicted for the second degree murder charge, but I think he brought on his troubles due to his "in your face" attitude. His may be the correct position, but there is also a question of "knowing" if an assisted suicide really wanted to die or someone just wanted them out of the way.
I think that there have been many cases of truly compassionate doctors giving their terminally ill patients a little too much medicine to allow them to slip away. There are some who want to leave this world with dignity by choosing when to go. I am not one of them, having been near death a few times. I know that even when the doctors say it is over that it may not always be the case, so the release of Dr. Kevorkian should at least get this issue out in the open once more.
Anyone who has ever had to make the choice of removing a close relative from intensive care machines knows how difficult it is to do and to live with later on.
There should be a good public debate on these life and death issues and hopefully we can find some compromise between keeping someone alive no matter what, or killing them because it is convenient.