Kevorkian Compares Self to Executioner

Comparing himself to a reluctant executioner, retired pathologist Jack Kevorkian went on trial for first-degree murder Monday, telling the jury that when he injected a man suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease with a fatal drug cocktail, he was merely carrying out his duty as a physician.

“To have a crime, you need a vicious will and a vicious act,” Kevorkian, who is acting as his own attorney, told the jury in Pontiac, Mich. “What I did for Thomas Youk was not a crime and was not murder.”

Oakland County prosecutor John Skrzynski objected, saying Kevorkian was arguing legal definitions rather than summarizing his case in the opening statement. Circuit Judge Jessica Cooper concurred, and dismissed the jury before asking the point Kevorkian was trying to make.

“What I was trying to prove here is that I didn’t have the intent to kill, just as an executioner doesn’t,” Kevorkian told the judge. “His intent is to do his duty, because he may despise what he is doing, but he is forced to do it by his position.”

The nation’s most visible proponent of physician-assisted suicide, Kevorkian has been acquitted three times on assisted-suicide charges. A fourth trial ended with a hung jury. But six months after the CBS program “60 Minutes” aired a tape of the 70-year-old Kevorkian apparently killing Youk, he faces a trial that could put an end to his right-to-die crusade.

Facing life in prison without possibility of parole, Kevorkian nonetheless asked earlier in the day to represent himself--against the advice of the attorneys who are helping him and Geoffrey Fieger, who successfully defended him for years.

“Do you understand that you could spend the rest of your life in prison?” Cooper asked.

“There’s not much of it left, your honor,” Kevorkian replied.

“Do you understand that that’s not a pleasant place to be?” Cooper persisted.

“I’ve been there,” Kevorkian said, referring to several brief jail stays. “Yes, I know.”

Gray and increasingly frail, Kevorkian has shaped public debate over physician-assisted suicide since he began helping patients take their own lives in 1990.

Says He’s Assisted More Than 130 Deaths

Claiming to have helped more than 130 people commit suicide, he has been cleared of assisted-suicide charges time and again by juries reluctant to punish a doctor for fulfilling the last wish of a patient in agony. And by last fall, the frontier for Kevorkian had become the right of patients so debilitated that they couldn’t take their own lives to have their doctor do it for them.

In September, Kevorkian videotaped a meeting with Youk, 52, an accountant from nearby Waterford Township who was so ravaged by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that he was afraid he would drown in his own saliva. Kevorkian returned the next day and videotaped Youk’s death.

Broadcast by “60 Minutes” during the fall “sweeps” period, the segment showed Youk slumped in his wheelchair, slurring responses to questions posed by Kevorkian. Then a man who appeared to be Kevorkian searched for a vein in Youk’s hand and administered an injection.

Declaring that the time had come to resolve the issue of physicians participating in the deaths of their terminally ill patients, Kevorkian challenged prosecutors to charge him with murder. They did, adding the charges of delivery of a controlled substance and assisted-suicide.

In recent weeks, it has become clear that Kevorkian’s latest turn before a jury likely will play out differently from previous trials.

Earlier this month, prosecutors decided to drop the assisted-suicide charge after the judge ruled that Kevorkian would be allowed to present evidence detailing how his efforts have helped end great pain and suffering. Such testimony, Cooper ruled, would not be admissible under the murder charge.

The move makes it less likely this jury will hear the kind of emotional testimony that has left members of previous panels sobbing. At the same time, legal scholars said, the assisted-suicide charge might have provided the 12 jurors impaneled Monday with a compromise should they want to punish Kevorkian but not find him guilty of murder.

Most Michigan residents support some form of physician-assisted suicide, according to several polls. Although voters in November defeated a referendum to legalize the practice by a margin of more than 2 to 1, many analysts attributed that outcome to the measure’s wording.

In his opening statement, Skrzynski asked the jury to “focus on what Jack Kevorkian does, and what Jack Kevorkian says. And what you will see is a man breaking the law. Jack Kevorkian killed Tom Youk, and Jack Kevorkian does not have the right to kill.”

Kevorkian is expected to argue that rather than commit murder, he helped an ailing man end his suffering.

“The analogy,” said Kevorkian attorney David Gorosh “is when a surgeon decides to amputate a leg to stop cancer from spreading. It isn’t intended to maim the patient, but to keep cancer from spreading.”

After a decade spent challenging the courts, the medical establishment and Americans’ attitude toward death, Kevorkian may have more than his defense in mind for this trial, legal experts said. How else to explain his insistence that he act as his own attorney?

‘Willing to Accept a Guilty Verdict’

“Kevorkian would rather put the system on trial than have the system put him on trial,” said Larry Dubin, a law professor at the University of Detroit Mercy. “He has said many times that we have a corrupt legal system and are living in an unenlightened time, and to prove that those [statements] are true, he will take on his own defense and increase the chances of his conviction.

“He is more than willing to accept a guilty verdict,” Dubin added. “He believes that his life has meaning in raising this issue, at this time in our history, and that ultimately he’ll be viewed as a person who was sane and rational fighting against insane and irrational medical and legal systems.”