Word: kevorkian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Jack Kevorkian had been warned that acting as his own attorney might have dire consequences. "You realize that being convicted of first-degree, premeditated murder means you could spend the rest of your life in prison?" Judge Jessica Cooper asked sternly at the beginning of his trial in Pontiac, Mich...
...There's not much left, your honor," Kevorkian, 70, answered...
...stubborn wisp of a man lumbered through the two-day proceedings, berated by the judge and derided by the prosecution for courtroom gaffes and blunders. Kevorkian discovered, for example, that he couldn't call the witnesses he wanted. The judge declared that the family of Thomas Youk, to whom Kevorkian had given a lethal injection, would raise the consent of the patient as a defense--one that was irrelevant in a murder case. Four times in the past, Kevorkian's lawyer Geoffrey Fieger (whom Kevorkian did not want representing him in this case) had beaten assisted-suicide charges by arguing...
...Thus Kevorkian, as he said later, "invited himself" to his own trial. It was his latest--and with Friday's guilty verdict, perhaps his last--attempt to provoke and expand the public discussion of euthanasia. "I had to raise the issue," Kevorkian told the jury. And he was unapologetic for using TV to get his point across: "This forum can get it to a stage quickly...
...Kevorkian had no real defense. The videotape clearly showed him injecting the lethal dose into Youk, and the judge told the jury that sympathy for either the patient or the doctor was no excuse. Prosecutor John Skrzynski was unrelenting in plucking the feathers of the self-described angel of mercy. He called Kevorkian "a medical hit man in the night with a bag of poison to do his job." And he said, "There are 11 million souls buried in Europe that can tell you that when you make euthanasia a state policy, some catastrophic things can evolve from that...