Last night on Bill Maher's HBO show, his guest was Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the suicide doctor. While he was in prison, Kevorkian sent Maher some of his paintings. One was of a headless body sitting at a table with a ghoulish figure holding the severed head over the table. Kevorkian said this painting was titled "Dinner Table." There was another painting shown, just as bizarre and macabre.
Nowadays Jack doesn't look like the wild eyed loony he was when he made court appearances before his conviction--now he looks like a medicated Hannibal Lecter--doped up but still dangerous.

Maher asked Jack "Well how many people did you kill?" To which Jack coyly replied "Oh about 130" (wink wink) as if he knew the real number but wasn't telling. I read that as part of his parole he must abstain from helping anybody else with suicide. I bet that really bothers him because he liked what he was doing. His enjoyment in watching people die was secondary to "helping" people end their lives.
And that's why although I agree that people should have self determination in their death, I wouldn't want to be hastened along that path by a psycopath like Kevorkian.

susil

This is from Wikipedia: Kevorkian is an oil painter--his work tends toward the grotesque. He sometimes paints in his own blood and has created pictures such as one "of a child eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse." (Sounds like a disturbed man to me, susil.)
In Nov. 1998 on a broadcast of 60 Minutes Kevorkian allowed the airing of a videotape he had made depicting himself administering a lethal injection to Thomas Youk. A Michigan jury found Kevorkian guilty of second degree homicide. It was proven that he had directly killed Youk because Youk wasn't able to kill himself.


Now this is from me, susil. To change things, you have to work within the system. You shake things up from the inside. Clearly there is great public interest in self determination in death, but you don't go off like a rogue, a loose cannon, dealing out assisted suicide when it is illegal. He could have spoken out, run for office, done all kinds of things to get his point across, but he chose to do it Jack's way because he has an inherent belief that he is smarter than everyone else. His ego gets a kick from being called Dr Death and from his notoriety. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
susil