State Moves to Revoke License of Kevorkian : Medicine: The action is largely symbolic because the ‘suicide’ doctor has not lived or worked in California for more than a decade.

California’s doctor disciplinary agency took steps Tuesday to revoke the medical license of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, declaring that the retired pathologist engaged in “unprofessional conduct” when he assisted in the suicide of desperately ill patients.

Dixon Arnett, executive director of the California Medical Board, said that revocation would require several months of hearings and that the state would seek an emergency order suspending Kevorkian’s license in the interim.

“Let me tell you this man is no angel of mercy and he is unfit to practice medicine in this state or any other,” said a grim-faced Arnett as he distributed copies of a 23-page complaint against the physician.

The revocation is largely symbolic. California is the only state in which Kevorkian now holds a license to practice, but he has not lived or worked in the state for more than a decade. Arnett acknowledged that the loss of the California license would not stop Kevorkian from assisting in suicides but he said it may discourage patients from seeking his help.

Kevorkian’s attorney, Michael Schwartz of Southfield, Mich., immediately complained that state officials were attacking his client in order to blunt criticism against their own agency. He noted that a recent California Highway Patrol investigation of the medical board had criticized the agency for its failure to take aggressive action in disciplining doctors.

In the accusation, Arnett argued that Kevorkian, now a Royal Oak, Mich., resident, should lose his California medical license because he had assisted in 15 suicides and had been the subject of disciplinary action in his home state. Michigan officials suspended Kevorkian’s license to practice medicine in that state in November, 1991.

Arnett said that unlike Michigan, California has a law prohibiting anyone from assisting in a suicide and that Kevorkian, who has held a California surgeon’s license since 1957, violated that law when he helped patients in Michigan die.

He urged reporters to study the cases cited in the accusation, saying they would find many of them “devastating” and “gruesome.”

Specifically, he cited the June, 1990, case of a woman who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and committed suicide, assisted by Kevorkian, in the back of a van in Michigan.

The accusation said it was “questionable” whether the woman, Janet Adkins, had been competent enough to make the decision to commit suicide.

Arnett said that after several failed attempts to find a vein, Kevorkian inserted a needle attached to an intravenous tube into the woman’s arm. He said the woman, at the doctor’s instruction, then pushed a button that allowed a lethal solution to flow through the tube.

“Dying in the back of a Volkswagen van with your blood splattered all over because ‘the angel’ could not find a vein in which to insert a needle can hardly be characterized as death with dignity,” Arnett said.

Schwartz insisted that Arnett had gotten many of the facts in the case wrong and that courts in Michigan had determined that the woman indeed had not only given her consent but had been competent when she did so. He said the woman had wanted to die before her disease progressed to the advanced stages.

He questioned why Michigan hadn’t sought to discipline Kevorkian in 1990 when Adkins died, or even in 1991 when it suspended his license, if the state had been so concerned about his actions.

Arnett said California officials had been reluctant to take action until Kevorkian had actually assisted in the suicides of California residents. The latest patients to commit suicide with his assistance were two Southern California cancer patients--Jonathan David Grenz, 44, of Costa Mesa and Martha Ruwart, 40, of San Diego. Both Grenz and Ruwart went to Michigan to commit suicide.