Body of Evidence Unearthed on the Dark World of Dr. Death
Reprinted fron the Australian Thursday October 10, 1996
The US Supreme Court is set to rule on the constitutionality or voluntary euthanasia. Robert Lusetich reports from Los Angeles on further disquiet about the world’s beat known practitioner.
Only the United States Supreme Court can stop Dr Death from killing again. To the beat of the Death March Saul and with the macabre Dr Jack Kevorkian leading the way, the US has come to the final falk in the road to "physician - assisted suicide".
The Supreme Court will this session, make one of the most far-reaching decisons of its history when it rules on the constitutionally of terminally ill patients committing suicide at their doctor's hand, known in Australia as voluntary active euthanasia.
And no one will be looking to see which road the US will take with greater interest than the Grim Reaper himself, Kevorkian.
This disturbing man - who appears to have more in common with Joseph Mangele than Mother Teresa - has somehow succeeded in spinning his image into that of a compassionate deliverer of innocents from unspeakable pain: a man fit for canonizing.
Americana look at his cold eyes surrounded by dark circles, and that perpetually gloomy expression and do not see a troubled individual, obsessed with death and killing, but instead an eccentric old man try in good in the face of government interference.
To be sure, the suffering of a dying loved one is hardly a pleasant experience. But the road down which Dr Death is luring his society has at its core a much much worse fate.
Just a cursory examination of the messenger will reveal the true nature of his message. A recent book, Appointment with Doctor Death, by Detroit reporter Michael Betzold, has received wide attention in recent months, including in these pages. It chronicles a study of a man who, in other times, would not be allowed to walk free in society much less become a role model.
During his medical residency, Kevorkian, says Betzold, donned a black arm band and volunteered to work the night shift because he realized more patients died at night; the "death rounds", he called them. He also carried a camera with him because he wanted to photograph the eyes at the precise moment of death. Yet Kevorkian, who not surprisingly chose pathology as his discipline, swears he is not obsessed with death.
Kevorkian’s artwork also offers a window into the man. His paintings are filled with detached organs, severed heads, blood maggots, bullets, skulls, suffering, cannibalism and other assorted cheerful subjects. His rendering of Christmas depicts Father Christmas’s boot stamping on a baby lying in a fireplace.
Indeed, religion is unquestionably Kevorkian’s favorite target: in a painting entitled Give Us This Day, a half-man, half-baby is shown eating the flesh o a decomposing corpse. (He maintains that Jesus Christ would have been much better off dying in the back of his rusty van, suffocating on carbon monoxide, than suffering on the cross.)
Betzold focuses the picture even further when he says he discovered that Kevorkian, early in his career, advocated medical experimentation on death row prison inmates. He has since expanded on the notion by suggesting that condemned prisoners be allowed to auction their organs. Dr Death has also put forward the suggestion that anyone who is sentenced to more than three years’ jail be given the option of suicide.
When he worked at Pontiac General Hospital, Kevorkian allegedly experimented with transfusing blood from corpses into live patients. This Frankenstein-like toying left one patient, Neal Nicol, with such a severe case of hepatitis that his eyeballs turned orange. On the subject of blood, Kevorkian - who tried to organize an exhibit of Adolf Hitler’s paintings - supposedly mixed his with that of a cadaver and used it to paint the frame for one of his artworks. It seems inconceivable, in the wake of this pathological behaviour, that the 75% of Americans who support Kevorkian’s killing spree really know in whom they are putting their faith.
Since his third acquittal in May of violating Michigan’s ban on assisted suicide, Kevorkian has been clocking up corpses - "medicides" as he calls them. He even did four in one week.
"He really feels he’s off and running, and no one can stop him," says University of Michigan constitutional law professor and assisted suicide scholar Yale Kamisar. "It’s unlikely that he’ll ever be convicted unless he makes a mistake." He may just have made such a mistake when he facilitated the ending of Rebecca Badger’s life - his 33rd ‘assist’. Badger, a 39 year old mother of two who was depressed and in pain, told Kevorkian she had multiple sclerosis and did not want to live. The problem was that her autopsy revealed she did not have MS but was dead, nonetheless.
Five weeks after that death, 42 year old Judith Curren was helped to die after telling Kevorkian she suffered from chronic fatigue and immune-deficiency syndrome, as well as the muscle disorder fibromyalgia. Wrong again. No sign of any disease was found. The medical examiner said that she was most likely worn out from carrying around 122kg on a 1.55 frame. Furthermore, she suffered from depression and took potentially addictive psychiatric drugs.
When Kevorkian was questioned on these miscues, he replied that "it has nothing to do with lethality. It’s quality of life."
Already, the goal posts have been moved. We have begun sliding down the "slippery slope" to Kevorkian heaven (or is it hell?), where anyone who feels down can just opt to kill themselves.