Jack Kevorkian Returns to Media Hype and Reputation Rehabilitation 
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by Wesley J. Smith
June 1, 2007
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.
Jack Kevorkian is set to be released from prison today. Don’t expect Dr. Death to keep a low profile. He is already scheduled to appear on 60 Minutes, where he will be interviewed by euthanasia proponent Mike Wallace. After that, the rest of the media is likely to extravagantly tout Kevorkian as the compassionate, if eccentric, retired doctor who helped desperate, terminally ill people put themselves out of their misery.
In actuality, most of Kevorkian’s “patients” were not terminally ill, but disabled and depressed. Several weren’t even sick, according to their autopsies. Moreover, Kevorkian never attempted to treat any of the 130 or so persons who traveled to Michigan to be hooked up to his suicide machines to die either by drug overdose or carbon monoxide poisoning.
And as for compassion — forget about it. Kevorkian was never in the killing business to alleviate unbearable suffering. Indeed, over the course of decades he repeatedly explained his ultimate goals in professional journals and in his 1991 book, Prescription Medicide. As Jack Kevorkian articulately expresses it himself, compassion had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Kevorkian’s adulthood obsession has been to perform live human experimentation on people he was killing. His first targets were condemned prisoners. Indeed, as far back as 1959, Kevorkian wrote in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminal Political Science:
"Capital punishment as it exists today offers a golden opportunity to break…limits [on human experimentation] by introducing into the situation an involuntary factor without destroying the necessary safeguard of consent. I propose that a prisoner condemned to death by due process of law be allowed to submit, by his own free choice, to medical experimentation under complete anesthesia (at the time appointed for administering the penalty) as a form of execution in lieu of conventional methods."
Twenty-five years later, Kevorkian continued advocating experimenting on condemned prisoners, which, in light of the advances in organ transplant medicine, he began to couple with calls to use executed prisoners as organ donors. In the October 1984 edition of MD, Kevorkian published “Dr. Guillotine’s Example,” in which he asserted:
Of course, capital punishment has always been rationalized as being “retribution” — allowing the condemned to “pay” with their lives. What nonsense! Payment means transfer of value. With execution there is no such thing; there is only total loss — and, of course, vengeance.
That no longer need be true. The fortuitous convergence of lethal injection and of our incredible success with organ transplantation promises to validate at least the erstwhile repayment. Many of the more than 1,200 men and women now crowding our states’ death rows are eager to suffer more meaningful death by donating vital organs to dying patients…Here finally, we have the opportunity to extract true payment — literal transfer of life from the condemned to the dying.
Meanwhile, Kevorkian was still obsessing about human experimentation. Writing in 1985 in the Journal of the National Medical Association, Kevorkian sought to wiggle out of the Nuremberg Code’s ethical rules for human experimentation.
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