After spending more than eight years behind bars for his last “mercy killing,” Jack Kevorkian will be freed from a Michigan prison in June, a prison spokesman announced. Kevorkian, the infamous ‘Dr. Death’ and poster boy for the euthanasia movement, killed over 130 people through assisted suicides in the 1990s, until he was sent to jail in 1999 for violating Michigan’s ban on assisted suicide. Leo Lalonde, the corrections spokesman, said the state of Michigan will parole Kevorkian in June, since he has promised he will not assist in any more suicides.
Wesley J. Smith wrote in the Daily Standard that there will probably be a media rush to interview Kevorkian once he is released from prison. Will it be Katie Couric, Oprah Winfrey or Barbara Walters? Smith asks. More important, he wonders whether the media will continue their habit of reporting Kevorkian is a compassionate advocate of assisted suicide for the terminally ill or the much more disturbing truth: that he has a fetish for death and that his advocacy of physician-assisted suicide is not reserved for the terminally ill, but anyone who wants to die. This article originally appeared Dec. 14 at LifeSiteNews.com and is reprinted with permission. Additional reporting by Paul Tuns. |
Kevorkian, 78, has been serving a 10- to 25-year sentence for the 1998 second-degree murder of Thomas Youk, 52, who had Lou Gehrig’s disease. That same year, Michigan banned the practice of assisted suicide. Youk’s death was videotaped and aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes. While Kevorkian has always been scheduled for parole on June 1, 2007, his lawyer, Mayer Morganroth, revealed that Kevorkian suffers from hepatitis C and diabetes and has less than a year to live.
