Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the crusader for assisted suicide who spent years in jail for his work, has died, according to a report from the Detroit Free Press.
Kevorkian’s lawyer Mayer Morganroth reportedly told the paper the 83-year-old died early Friday morning at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, where he had been hospitalized for about two weeks with kidney and heart problems.
The report said it appears Kevorkian suffered a pulmonary thrombosis when a blood clot from his leg broke free and lodged in his heart.
"It was peaceful. He didn’t feel a thing," the lawyer told the paper.
Kevorkian’s controversial work earned him the nickname Doctor Death.
The doctor claimed he had actively helped 130 people to die, and his efforts contributed to an international debate on euthanasia that continues to this day.
He spent more than eight years in jail for the murder of a man whose videotaped assisted suicide was aired on national television.
Kevorkian went public with his suicide machines in 1990 and the videos of his patients begging him to help them die.
He dropped bodies off at hospitals and dumped them in parks and abandoned buildings. He brandished the kidneys of a man he’d helped die during a 1998 news conference saying, "first come, first served," a reference to organ donation.
Kevorkian’s campaign to legalize physician-assisted suicide has had limited success. While his native Michigan rejected a proposal shortly before he went to trial, the state of Oregon passed the Death With Dignity Act in 1997 and the state of Washington followed suit in 2008.
Files from AFP
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