{"id":102652,"date":"2011-06-03T19:02:57","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T14:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=102652"},"modified":"2011-06-03T19:02:57","modified_gmt":"2011-06-03T14:02:57","slug":"dr-death-jack-kevorkian-dies-at-83","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2011\/06\/03\/dr-death-jack-kevorkian-dies-at-83.html","title":{"rendered":"‘Dr. Death’ Jack Kevorkian Dies at 83"},"content":{"rendered":"

Assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, known as “Dr. Death” for helping more than 100 people end their lives, died early on Friday at age 83, his lawyer said, Reuters reports<\/span><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kevorkian died at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, where he had been hospitalized for about two weeks with kidney and heart problems, said Mayer Morganroth, Kevorkian’s attorney and friend.<\/p>\n

Kevorkian, a pathologist, was focused on death and dying long before he became a defiant advocate, crossing Michigan in the rusty Volkswagen van that carried his machine to help sick people end their lives.<\/p>\n

He launched his assisted-suicide campaign in 1990, allowing an Alzheimer’s patient to kill herself using a machine he had devised. He beat Michigan prosecutors four times before his conviction for second-degree murder in 1999.<\/p>\n

Kevorkian was imprisoned for eight years for second-degree murder and was paroled in 2007. As a condition of his parole, he vowed not to assist in any suicides.<\/p>\n

He was convicted after a CBS News program aired showing a video of Kevorkian administering lethal drugs to a 52-year-old man suffering from debilitating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.<\/p>\n

The Armenian-born Kevorkian did not leave the public eye after his exit from prison in 2007, giving occasional lectures and in 2008 running for Congress unsuccessfully.<\/p>\n

An HBO documentary on his life “Kevorkian” and a movie “You Don’t Know Jack” starring Al Pacino brought him back into the news last year.<\/p>\n

In a June 2010 interview with Reuters Television, the right-to-die activist said he was afraid of death as much as anyone else and said the world had a hypocritical attitude toward voluntary euthanasia, or assisted suicide.<\/p>\n

“Now we’ve avoided death because we don’t like death. Religion says that’s a big enemy, leave it alone. But we went beyond birth, into conception. Now we’re dabbling in that,” he said.<\/p>\n

“If we can aid people into coming into the world, why can’t we aid them in exiting the world?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, known as “Dr. Death” for helping more than 100 people end their lives, died early on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":102624,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[27713,26806,27714,26804],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102652"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}