Jack Kevorkian Assisted Suicide Case Summary

This article is written about the verdict which found Dr. Jack Kevorkian guilty of second degree murder back in 1999. Dr. Jack Kevorkian, or better known as “Dr. Death”, was sentenced to a minimum of 10-25 years in prison after “video taping himself injecting Mr. Youk, who was paralyzed, with lethal chemicals”. However, Dr. Kevorkian did not gain the title of “Dr. Death” directly from this case; rather, he was known to have facilitated at least 130 assisted suicide cases prior to Thomas Youk’s, with no serious legal charges pressed against him. So, what made Youk’s case differ from others one may ask? This time, unlike the many others, Dr. Kevorkian video taped himself injecting the 52 year old amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patient with lethal chemicals; nonetheless, in the four other legal cases he was involved in, he was known to have violated the laws against assisted suicide but only by helping patients give themselves fatal injections through a so called “suicide machine”. …show more content…
Kevorkian could not convince the judge that they were relevant to his defense, nor provide a testimony about Mr. Youk’s condition and his “desire to end life”, aside from the video tape which showed his obvious suffering. The Hemlock Society's chief proponent of doctor assisted suicide states that “the verdict had nothing to with Dr. Kevorkian nor the videotape”; instead, this was more to do with “the contempt that the government has for people like Thomas Youk and other patients who are suffering painful deaths everyday”, and not to mention Michigan’s ban on assisted suicide. Although Dr. Kevorkian ended up serving only eight years in prison by promising to never facilitate another assisted suicide, it did not change others opinions on what he had