Curtains for Dr. Death

By Julie Grace/Pontiac

Jack Kevorkian had been warned that acting as his own attorney might have dire consequences. "You realize that being convicted of first-degree, premeditated murder means you could spend the rest of your life in prison?" Judge Jessica Cooper asked sternly at the beginning of his trial in Pontiac, Mich.

"There's not much left, your honor," Kevorkian, 70, answered.

"Have you ever been inside Jackson prison?" the judge continued. "You understand it's not a pleasant place to be."

"I've seen movies."

And so the stubborn wisp of a man lumbered through the two-day proceedings, berated by the judge and derided by the prosecution for courtroom gaffes and blunders. Kevorkian discovered, for example, that he couldn't call the witnesses he wanted. The judge declared that the family of Thomas Youk, to whom Kevorkian had given a lethal injection, would raise the consent of the patient as a defense--one that was irrelevant in a murder case. Four times in the past, Kevorkian's lawyer Geoffrey Fieger (whom Kevorkian did not want representing him in this case) had beaten assisted-suicide charges by arguing that the ex-pathologist had only been relieving the suffering of the patients, who administered their own suicides. This time was different, Cooper said: Kevorkian had done the deed himself, and the crime was murder. Last September, Youk, who was suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, received the deadly mixture of drugs from Kevorkian as the procedure was recorded on videotape. It was later broadcast on CBS's 60 Minutes. "It's not necessarily murder," Kevorkian told correspondent Mike Wallace. "But it doesn't bother me what you call it. I know what it is."

Thus Kevorkian, as he said later, "invited himself" to his own trial. It was his latest--and with Friday's guilty verdict, perhaps his last--attempt to provoke and expand the public discussion of euthanasia. "I had to raise the issue," Kevorkian told the jury. And he was unapologetic for using TV to get his point across: "This forum can get it to a stage quickly."

But Kevorkian had no real defense. The videotape clearly showed him injecting the lethal dose into Youk, and the judge told the jury that sympathy for either the patient or the doctor was no excuse. Prosecutor John Skrzynski was unrelenting in plucking the feathers of the self-described angel of mercy. He called Kevorkian "a medical hit man in the night with a bag of poison to do his job." And he said, "There are 11 million souls buried in Europe that can tell you that when you make euthanasia a state policy, some catastrophic things can evolve from that."

Kevorkian was candid about his lack of legal expertise. "If I looked inept, I was--in law. But I'm articulate in English." Though peppered with objections, he nevertheless turned his closing arguments into personal testimony on euthanasia and on his crusade. Comparing himself to Rosa Parks on the bus and to Martin Luther King Jr., Kevorkian told the jury that "there are certain acts that by sheer common sense are not crimes. Honestly now, do you see what [the prosecution] calls a killer? If you do, then you must convict. If you don't think I'm a criminal, then you must acquit." Thirteen hours of deliberation found him guilty of second-degree murder rather than the first-degree charge demanded by Skrzynski, which would have put Kevorkian in line for a mandatory life sentence. Instead, he could get 10 to 25 years on the murder charge and seven years on a related conviction for delivering a controlled substance. Kevorkian will appeal the verdict.

The Youks remain steadfast supporters of Kevorkian. Youk's widow Melody and brother Terry want to remind people that Kevorkian had the videotape made to protect them: to show that only he was present at Tom's death, that only he could be charged with murder. They told TIME they are frustrated that the case focused on definitions of murder instead of on how Kevorkian ended Tom's suffering. Says Terry: "We weren't able to give the jurors any kind of picture of who Tom was, what he was going through." A documentary filmmaker, Terry Youk recalls his brother's description of the agony: a "body plugged into an electrical socket." It was, says Terry, "the kind of pain that medicine couldn't help." "I don't want to die," Tom had said, "but I don't want to live like this." And the choice? "The family didn't make the decision," says Terry. "My brother did." Says Melody: "He did not want to become a prisoner in his own body." Of Kevorkian's cause, Terry says, "You have to put yourself in harm's way when you feel there's an unjust law. There are physicians across the country performing the same medical services. There's only one doctor willing to stand up and put his life on it."