Eighty-three-year-old Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan pathologist who supported physician-assisted suicide and “right-to-die” legislation and put assisted suicide on the world’s medical ethics stage, died today at Beaumont Hospital in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak. He had been hospitalized for pneumonia and a kidney-related ailment.

Through the 1990s he was charged with murder numerous times for helping terminally ill patients take their own lives. And in 1999 he was convicted on second-degree murder charges stemming from the death of a patient who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was paroled in 2007.

We do not know what Dr. Kevorkian’s final days and hours were like.

Had he been hooked up to a machine to prolong his life?

Did he receive pain medication to ease his transition from this life?

Apparently he himself did not commit assisted suicide—he died from a blood clot that broke free in his leg and lodged in his heart.

No doubt his death will spark a renewed debate over the issues of assisted suicide and the right to choose.

In your eyes, was he a hero…or a killer?

Whatever your position, he will always be remembered as the man who tried to prevent the needless suffering in others.

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My Friend
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