« What one misses during faculty meetings | Main | An ugly (and fitting?) end to the capital year »

December 13, 2006

Dr. Death gets a new lease on life

As detailed in this AP story, after 8+ years in prison "a frail Dr. Jack Kevorkian will be paroled in June with a promise that he won't assist in any more suicides, a prison spokesman said Wednesday."  Here's the basics for those who may not recall Dr. Death's exploits:

Kevorkian, once the nation's most vocal advocate of assisted suicide for the terminally ill, is serving a 10- to 25-year sentence for second-degree murder in the 1998 poisoning of Thomas Youk, 52, Oakland County man with Lou Gehrig's disease. Michigan banned assisted suicide in 1998.

Youk's death was videotaped and shown on CBS' "60 Minutes."  Kevorkian, who claimed to have assisted in at least 130 deaths in the 1990s, called it a mercy killing.  Mayer Morganroth, Kevorkian's attorney, said this summer that Kevorkian, now 78, was suffering from hepatitis C and diabetes, that his weight had dropped to 113 pounds and that he had less than a year to live....

Kevorkian has always been eligible for parole on June 1, 2007, and will now be released on that date, Lalonde said....  If Kevorkian is released on June 1, he will have spent close to 3,000 days in prison since being sentenced in April 1999.  He has promised he would not assist in a suicide if he was released from prison.

December 13, 2006 at 08:38 PM | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451574769e200d8353a2e0d53ef

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Dr. Death gets a new lease on life:

Comments

Post a comment

In the body of your email, please indicate if you are a professor, student, prosecutor, defense attorney, etc. so I can gain a sense of who is reading my blog. Thank you, DAB