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"You had the audacity to go on national TV, show the world what you did and dare the prosecution to stop you," Oakland County (Mich.) Circuit Judge Jessica Cooper told Kevorkian after sentencing him. "Well, sir, consider yourself stopped."
After serving eight years, Kevorkian was released from prison in 2007, with one of the conditions of his two-year parole being that he not conduct any more assisted suicides.
In an interview with the New York Times two days after his release, Kevorkian proved to be as fiercely combative as ever, complaining that during his time in prison no new laws had been passed that would allow assisted suicide.
The government, Kevorkian said, was "the tyrant" and the public were "sheep." As for his severest critics, he said they were "religious fanatics or nuts."
During the peak of his notoriety in the 1990s, the eccentric, Bach-loving Kevorkian revealed other sides of himself.
He was a jazz musician and composer, who played flute and organ on a limited-release CD performed with the Morpheus Quintet and featuring his own compositions, "The Kevorkian Suite: A Very Still Life."
And, more in keeping with his Dr. Death image, he was an oil painter of surrealistic, often gruesome, canvases depicting medical conditions and social commentary — paintings of what Vanity Fair writer Jack Lessenberry described as "such merry scenes as a child eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse and Santa crushing a baby in a manger."
Kevorkian, who wrote a number of books, ran as an independent candidate for Michigan's 9th Congressional District in Oakland County in 2008; he received less than 3% of the votes.
In 2010, Al Pacino delivered an Emmy Award-winning performance as Kevorkian in the HBO biopic "You Don't Know Jack."
"He turned away the vast majority of people who came to him, he didn't take money for what he did, and he did not see these patients as people he was killing," Pacino told the New York Times before the film's premiere. "He saw them as people whose pain he could relieve."
Asked by CNN's Anderson Cooper at the time if he regretted taking up a cause that sent him to prison, Kevorkian replied: "No, why would I?"
Kevorkian is survived by his sister, Flora Holzheimer.
dennis.mclellan@latimes.com
After serving eight years, Kevorkian was released from prison in 2007, with one of the conditions of his two-year parole being that he not conduct any more assisted suicides.
In an interview with the New York Times two days after his release, Kevorkian proved to be as fiercely combative as ever, complaining that during his time in prison no new laws had been passed that would allow assisted suicide.
The government, Kevorkian said, was "the tyrant" and the public were "sheep." As for his severest critics, he said they were "religious fanatics or nuts."
During the peak of his notoriety in the 1990s, the eccentric, Bach-loving Kevorkian revealed other sides of himself.
He was a jazz musician and composer, who played flute and organ on a limited-release CD performed with the Morpheus Quintet and featuring his own compositions, "The Kevorkian Suite: A Very Still Life."
And, more in keeping with his Dr. Death image, he was an oil painter of surrealistic, often gruesome, canvases depicting medical conditions and social commentary — paintings of what Vanity Fair writer Jack Lessenberry described as "such merry scenes as a child eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse and Santa crushing a baby in a manger."
Kevorkian, who wrote a number of books, ran as an independent candidate for Michigan's 9th Congressional District in Oakland County in 2008; he received less than 3% of the votes.
In 2010, Al Pacino delivered an Emmy Award-winning performance as Kevorkian in the HBO biopic "You Don't Know Jack."
"He turned away the vast majority of people who came to him, he didn't take money for what he did, and he did not see these patients as people he was killing," Pacino told the New York Times before the film's premiere. "He saw them as people whose pain he could relieve."
Asked by CNN's Anderson Cooper at the time if he regretted taking up a cause that sent him to prison, Kevorkian replied: "No, why would I?"
Kevorkian is survived by his sister, Flora Holzheimer.
dennis.mclellan@latimes.com
