Murad Jacob "Jack" Kevorkian was an Armenian-American pathologist and euthanasia proponent.
60 Facts About Jack Kevorkian
2.
Jack Kevorkian publicly championed a terminal patient's right to die by physician-assisted suicide, embodied in his quote, "Dying is not a crime".
3.
Jack Kevorkian was convicted of murder in 1999 and was often portrayed in the media with the name of "Dr Death".
4.
In 1998, Jack Kevorkian was arrested and tried for his role in the voluntary euthanasia of a man named Thomas Youk who had Lou Gehrig's disease, or ALS.
5.
Jack Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder and served eight years of a 10-to-25-year prison sentence.
6.
Jack Kevorkian was released on parole on June 1,2007, on condition he would not offer advice about, participate in, or be present at the act of any type of euthanasia to any other person, as well as neither promote nor talk about the procedure of assisted suicide.
7.
Jack Kevorkian was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on May 26,1928, to Armenian immigrants from the Ottoman Empire.
8.
Jack Kevorkian's father, Levon, was born in the village of Passen, near Erzurum, and his mother, Satenig, was born in the village of Govdun, near Sivas.
9.
Jack Kevorkian's father left Ottoman Armenia and made his way to Pontiac in 1912, where he found work at an automobile foundry.
10.
When Jack Kevorkian was a child, his parents took him to an Orthodox church weekly.
11.
Jack Kevorkian started questioning the existence of a God, as he believed an all-knowing God would have prevented the Armenian Genocide on his extended family.
12.
Jack Kevorkian stopped attending church by the time he was 12.
13.
Jack Kevorkian was a child prodigy, teaching himself multiple languages.
14.
Jack Kevorkian graduated from Pontiac Central High School with honors in 1945, at the age of 17.
15.
Jack Kevorkian completed residency training in anatomical and clinical pathology and briefly conducted research on blood transfusion.
16.
Over a period of decades, Jack Kevorkian developed several controversial ideas related to death.
17.
Senior doctors at the University of Michigan, Jack Kevorkian's employer, opposed his proposal and Jack Kevorkian chose to leave the university rather than stop advocating his ideas.
18.
Jack Kevorkian returned to the idea of using death-row inmates for medical purposes after the Supreme Court's 1976 decision in Gregg v Georgia reinstituted the death penalty.
19.
Jack Kevorkian advocated harvesting the organs from inmates after the death penalty was carried out for transplant into sick patients, but he failed to gain the cooperation of prison officials.
20.
Jack Kevorkian drew blood from corpses recently brought into the hospital and transferred it successfully into the bodies of hospital staff members.
21.
Jack Kevorkian thought that the US military might be interested in using this technique to help wounded soldiers during a battle, but the Pentagon was not interested.
22.
In 1987, Jack Kevorkian started advertising in Detroit newspapers as a physician consultant for "death counseling".
23.
Jack Kevorkian allegedly assisted only by attaching the individual to a euthanasia device that he had devised and constructed.
24.
The report further asserted that Jack Kevorkian's counseling was too brief and lacked a psychiatric exam in at least 19 cases, 5 of which involved people with histories of depression, though Jack Kevorkian was sometimes alerted that the patient was unhappy for reasons other than their medical condition.
25.
In 2011, disability rights and anti-legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia group Not Dead Yet spoke out against Jack Kevorkian, citing potentially concerning sentiments he expressed in his published writing.
26.
The Jack Kevorkian Suite: A Very Still Life was a 1997 limited-release CD of 5,000 copies from the 'Lucid Subjazz' label.
27.
Jack Kevorkian wrote all the songs but one; the album was reviewed in jazzreview.
28.
Jack Kevorkian's work tended toward the grotesque and surreal, and he had created pieces of symbolic art, such as one "of a child eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse".
29.
Jack Kevorkian was tried four times for assisting suicides between May 1994 and June 1997.
30.
On November 25,1998, Jack Kevorkian was charged with second-degree murder and the delivery of a controlled substance.
31.
Jack Kevorkian had discharged his attorneys and proceeded through the trial representing himself, a decision he later regretted.
32.
Inexperienced in law but persisting in his efforts to represent himself, Jack Kevorkian encountered great difficulty in presenting his evidence and arguments.
33.
Jack Kevorkian was not able to call any witnesses to the stand as the judge did not deem the testimony of any of his witnesses relevant.
34.
Jack Kevorkian was sent to a prison in Coldwater, Michigan, to serve his sentence.
35.
Reportedly terminally ill with Hepatitis C, which he contracted while doing research on blood transfusions in the 1960s, Jack Kevorkian was expected to die within a year in May 2006.
36.
Jack Kevorkian had spent eight years and two and a half months in prison.
37.
Jack Kevorkian was on parole for two years, under the conditions that he would not help anyone else die, or provide care for anyone older than 62 or disabled.
38.
Jack Kevorkian said he would abstain from assisting any more terminal patients with death, and his role in the matter would strictly be to persuade states to change their laws on assisted suicide.
39.
Jack Kevorkian was forbidden by the rules of his parole from commenting about assisted suicide procedure.
40.
Jack Kevorkian lectured at universities such as the University of Florida, Nova Southeastern University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
41.
Jack Kevorkian's lectures were not limited to the topic of euthanasia; he discussed such topics as tyranny, the criminal justice system, politics, the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Armenian culture.
42.
Jack Kevorkian appeared on the Fox News Channel's Your World with Neil Cavuto on September 2,2009, to discuss health care reform.
43.
Jack Kevorkian was again interviewed by Cavuto on Your World on April 19,2010, regarding the movie and Jack Kevorkian's world view.
44.
You Don't Know Jack Kevorkian premiered April 24,2010, on HBO.
45.
Jack Kevorkian walked the red carpet alongside Al Pacino, who portrayed him in the film.
46.
Pacino received Emmy and Golden Globe awards for his portrayal and personally thanked Jack Kevorkian, who was in the audience, upon receiving both of these awards.
47.
On March 12,2008, Jack Kevorkian announced plans to run for United States Congress to represent Michigan's 9th congressional district as an independent against eight-term congressman Joe Knollenberg, former Michigan Lottery commissioner and state senator Gary Peters, Adam Goodman and Douglas Campbell.
48.
Ultimately, Jack Kevorkian received 8,987 votes in the election, in which Peters defeated the incumbent Knollenberg by a nine-percent margin.
49.
Jack Kevorkian was hospitalized on May 18,2011, with kidney problems and pneumonia.
50.
Jack Kevorkian's condition grew rapidly worse and he died from a thrombosis on June 3,2011, eight days after his 83rd birthday, at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan.
51.
Jack Kevorkian was buried in White Chapel Memorial Park Cemetery in Troy, Michigan.
52.
Jack Kevorkian spoke at Presbyterian and Episcopal churches to gain support for euthanasia.
53.
John Finn, medical director of palliative care at the Catholic St John's Hospital, said Jack Kevorkian's methods were unorthodox and inappropriate.
54.
Jack Kevorkian added that many of Kevorkian's patients were isolated, lonely, and potentially depressed, and therefore in no state to mindfully choose whether to live or die.
55.
Derek Humphry, author of the suicide handbook Final Exit, said Jack Kevorkian was "too obsessed, too fanatical, in his interest in death and suicide to offer direction for the nation".
56.
Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan, said that Jack Kevorkian "was a major historical figure in modern medicine".
57.
The Catholic Church in Detroit said Jack Kevorkian left behind a "deadly legacy" that denied scores of people their right to humane deaths.
58.
Jack Kevorkian started at a time when it was hardly talked about and got people thinking about the issue.
59.
Jack Kevorkian paid one hell of a price, and that is one of the hallmarks of true heroism.
60.
In 2015, the 1968 Volkswagen Type 2 van in which Jack Kevorkian assisted some of his suicidal patients was bought by paranormal investigator Zak Bagans for display in his haunted museum in Las Vegas.