Kevorkian Is Sentenced to 10 to 25 Years

After nine years, five trials, 130 assisted suicides and finally a murder conviction, former pathologist Jack Kevorkian was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison Tuesday and, smiling sadly, led in handcuffs from the courtroom.

“You said you invited yourself here to make a final stand,” Oakland County Circuit Judge Jessica Cooper said sternly before meting out the sentence prosecutors had sought. “You invited yourself to the wrong forum.”

Defense attorneys said they would appeal Kevorkian’s second-degree murder conviction in the 1998 killing of Thomas Youk, whose videotaped death was broadcast on the CBS-TV program “60 Minutes.” But Tuesday’s sentence may well mean the end of Kevorkian’s leading role in the national right-to-die campaign--a movement he drove with provocative panache but which had begun to distance itself from him in recent years.

Cooper, unswayed by wrenching appeals for leniency by Youk’s wife and brother, also handed Kevorkian a 3- to 7-year sentence for delivery of a controlled substance--secobarbitol, part of a three-drug cocktail used to render Youk unconscious, then stop his heart and breathing. The sentences will run concurrently.

“You had the audacity to go on national television, show the world what you did and dare the legal system to stop you,” Cooper said in a sharp lecture. “Well, sir, consider yourself stopped.

“This trial was not about the political or moral correctness of euthanasia. It was all about you, sir,” she added. “It was all about lawlessness.”

The frail 70-year-old Kevorkian, dressed for his court date in a navy blue version of the thrift-shop sweater-vests he prefers, must serve at least 6 years and 8 months before becoming eligible for parole.

Whisked away in a white sheriff’s van, Kevorkian was to be driven to the Oakland County Jail, then to Southern Michigan Prison in Jackson for several weeks of evaluation. He will then be transferred to a permanent cell.

Before his murder trial in March, Kevorkian said a conviction would be proof that he lived in an unenlightened age, and promised to starve himself in prison.

One friend, when asked about the grim pledge Tuesday, shook his head and said, “When Jack Kevorkian says he will do something, he does it.” But another acquaintance said, “Jack Kevorkian is strong. Don’t worry about Jack Kevorkian.”

State prison officials told the Detroit News they would feed Kevorkian intravenously if necessary.

In a courtroom packed with supporters, opponents and sheriff’s deputies, the sentencing hearing began with testimony not allowed at trial--details of Youk’s intense suffering, delivered by his widow, Melody, and brother, Terry.

Youk, who restored classic cars for a living, researched his illness, Lou Gehrig’s disease, studied his symptoms, tried experimental drug therapies--anything and everything to keep living, Melody Youk said. He bought a van that could accommodate his wheelchair, modified a race car so he could drive it even though his legs were atrophied. But by the time he wrote to Kevorkian in September, Youk could move only his tongue and his right thumb and forefinger.

“I was heartbroken to realize that in spite of our efforts, we had come to the end,” Melody Youk said. When her husband first met with Kevorkian, he was so weak he feared he would be unable to give himself an injection using Kevorkian’s so-called “suicide machine,” and asked the doctor to administer the fatal dose.

“He was not depressed,” Melody Youk told Cooper. “He was not a victim. He had come to the end of his life. He requested Dr. Kevorkian’s help and was grateful for it.”

Punctuated by tears, the family’s testimony was precisely the kind of emotional evidence that had helped sway four previous juries, which refused to convict Kevorkian on assisted suicide charges for helping carry out the last wish of agonized patients.

In the Youk case, prosecutors initially charged Kevorkian with assisted suicide as well, but dropped the charge after Cooper ruled such testimony was not relevant in a murder case.

It was unclear who would pay for the doctor’s appeal. Previously, attorneys mostly worked on a pro bono basis for Kevorkian, who lives primarily off his Social Security income and donations.

Critics of physician-assisted suicide, church groups and leaders of the American Medical Assn. all praised Tuesday’s sentence, many commending Cooper for courage in her decision. She could have sentenced him to as light a sentence as probation.

“I never realized how heavy the weight was,” said Tina Allerellie, who says Kevorkian helped her 34-year-old sister commit suicide in 1997 even though her sister’s depression over having multiple sclerosis was far worse than the symptoms of the disease. “Then I saw those handcuffs go on and I was a helium balloon.”

Most right-to-die advocates were more subdued--but most agreed that Kevorkian had crossed a gray line by such a margin that his deed could not be condoned. “He chose to go further than the movement wants, than the community wants, than the public wants,” said George Eighmey, executive director of Compassion in Dying of Oregon.

For years, Kevorkian garnered considerable support from even relatively conservative right-to-die proponents, who often disagreed with his tactics but also benefited from his thought-provoking, camera-ready courtroom spectacles.

As he crept ever closer to the fringes of the movement, however, many longtime supporters began to distance themselves. Others, including Janet Good, chapter founder of the Michigan Hemlock Society, died. And by the time Youk’s death was broadcast to the world, Kevorkian had become something of an outsider in the cause he had borne for so long.

When he was convicted in March, many former supporters breathed a quiet sigh of relief, albeit a melancholy one, hoping they could shift the focus of the debate from murder back to end-of-life care.

“He was an extremist. But I haven’t seen too many movements without extremists,” said Charlotte Ross of the Death With Dignity National Center in San Mateo. “He raised a lot of good questions. However, I think he came up with some wrong answers.”

Nonetheless, many advocates of assisted suicide say their movement would never have come so far so fast without Kevorkian. Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act is the only physician-assisted suicide law in place, but California, New York and Washington are among the states currently considering similar measures. Michigan voters defeated a ballot proposal last fall, but polls show 60% support for some type of assisted-suicide law, and many attribute the fall defeat to the wording of the measure.

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Video excerpts of Jack Kevorkian’s sentencing hearing are available on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/kevorkian