Word: kevorkians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when Kevorkian attended the suicide of Ronald Mansur, a Realtor with bone and lung cancer, he did not bring a video camera, and when it was over, he did not call a press conference. There was no suicide note; there were no relatives looking on and no explanations. Just an anonymous call to 911, telling police where to find the body -- in effect, telling the State of Michigan to go to hell...
...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...