Kevorkian Serving 10- to 25-Year Murder Sentence

By Liz Townsend

Michigan Judge Jessica Cooper finally halted Jack Kevorkian's nine-year euthanasia campaign April 13, sentencing him to 10 to 25 years in prison for the second-degree murder of Thomas Youk.

Kevorkian, now known not as "Dr. Death" but as "Prisoner No. 284797," will be eligible for parole on May 26, 2007, two days before his 79th birthday, according to the Detroit Free Press. Although he has frequently threatened to starve himself to death if imprisoned, Kevorkian told his lawyer that he would continue to eat while his case is being appealed, the Free Press reported.

"We hope that he will never get out of prison," Diane Coleman of the disability-rights group Not Dead Yet told the Detroit News. "He has shown an utter contempt for the law and a deadly contempt for us [people with disabilties]."

Judge Cooper of the Oakland County Circuit Court announced the sentence in a strong statement that took Kevorkian to task for his disregard for the law. In addition to the jail time for murder, Cooper also sentenced him to three to seven years for delivery of a controlled substance. The sentences will run concurrently.

"You were on bond to another judge when you committed this offense; you were not licensed to practice medicine when you committed this offense," Cooper told Kevorkian at the sentencing hearing. "And you had the audacity to go on national television, show the world what you did, and dare the legal system to stop you. Well, sir, consider yourself stopped."

Kevorkian was convicted March 26. The case was based on a videotape broadcast to the nation by 60 Minutes in November, showing Kevorkian injecting Thomas Youk, 52, who had Lou Gehrig's disease, with lethal drugs.

The sentencing was originally set for Wednesday, April 14, but Cooper rescheduled it for one day earlier to provide better security. Wednesday is typically the busiest day on Judge Cooper's docket, according to the Free Press.

Youk's wife and brother asked the judge at the sentencing hearing not to jail Kevorkian, insisting Youk wanted to end his suffering. Kevorkian's lawyer Meyer Morganroth, hired after the trial at which Kevorkian represented himself, asked Cooper for "a day or a year and a day and probation," according to CNN.

However, Assistant Prosecutor John Skrzynski was adamant that Kevorkian receive a stiff sentence. "In the laws of this state, what Jack Kevorkian did is murder," he said at the hearing, CNN reported. "That's the law of this state, and it will be the law until the people of this state change it."

Michigan voters most recently weighed in on the question in a November 1998 ballot referendum, in which they rejected the legalization of assisted suicide by more than a 2-1 margin.

Kevorkian's prison sentence is by no means the end of the pro-euthanasia movement in this country. The state of Oregon is just now learning of the outcome of its first year of legalized euthanasia: inadequate reporting requirements, deaths based on "quality of life" criteria, and "physician-shopping" to find a doctor who would prescribe lethal drugs (See story, page 20).

In California, an assembly committee has favorably reported out a bill similar to Oregon's law, and in Alaska a lawsuit is underway in state court with the objective of getting assisting suicide declared a state constitutional right.

Euthanasia advocates said they will still work for legal euthanasia despite Kevorkian's prison sentence. "The sentencing affects one person: Jack Kevorkian," Charlotte Ross, executive director of the Death with Dignity National Center, told the Detroit News. "That's not the movement."

Pro-lifers insisted that the fight against euthanasia is far from over. "While it is a relief that for the immediate future Kevorkian will not be in a position to do what he has just been convicted of doing, the most critical phase in the struggle to protect vulnerable older people and people with disabilities from euthanasia is just about to begin," said Burke Balch, director of NRLC's Department of Medical Ethics. "Unless Congress acts promptly to pass protective national legislation, we will continue to see deaths in Oregon and the repeated threat in state after state of expanding the legalized killing."