Word: kevorkian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last time Kevorkian hauled out his carbon monoxide mask, Michigan's lawmakers decided it was time to shut down his practice. In February the state declared his specialty a felony punishable by up to four years in jail and a $2,000 fine. Three previous attempts to charge the doctor with murder had failed, and his opponents relished the chance to make something stick. The A.C.L.U. challenged the law, and Kevorkian promised to postpone any further medicide until after the court reached a decision. But apparently he ran out of patience...
That would be a gesture familiar to Dr. Kevorkian, who has made defiance of the law a passion second only to suicide. "When the law itself is intrinsically immoral," says Kevorkian's irrepressible mouthpiece, lawyer Geoffrey Fieger, "there is a greater duty to violate the law." Yet this time around Kevorkian merely tiptoed past it. Fieger says the doctor isn't taking any credit for helping a desperate man die. He just wanted to watch...
...police arrested him anyway, but Kevorkian refused to cooperate. "He will not tell us what happened inside the building," says inspector Gerald Stewart, who heads the major-crimes division of the Detroit police department. "We will have to establish that someone did assist in a suicide, and it's kind of difficult." After two hours, during which he watched the Knicks- Hornets play-off game, police released Kevorkian into Fieger's custody...
...Kevorkian's new stealth strategy may simply be a means of self-preservation. Indeed, his chances of avoiding prison improved enormously at the end of the week, when Judge Cynthia Stephens, citing a technicality, struck down the Michigan law that threatened to curtail Kevorkian's efforts. Stephens also found that two terminally ill plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. case had a right to die. She wrote, "This court cannot envisage a more fundamental right than the right to self-determination...
...ruling left Kevorkian's opponents flabbergasted. "If I were a gambler, I'd bet that Kevorkian will kill someone tomorrow," said local Operation Rescue activist Lynn Mills after hearing the decision. "He's really out of control...