Assisted suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian has lost his US Supreme Court appeal against his conviction for the videotaped murder of a terminally ill Michigan man.
Kevorkian's appeal was rejected on the basis that the right to be free from "unbearable and irremediable pain and suffering is deeply rooted" in US history and the Constitution.
|
|
Dr Jack Kevorkian after his appeal to the US Supreme Court was rejected
|
Kevorkian, (74), a retired pathologist, is serving a prison sentence of between 10 and 25 years for second-degree murder in the 1998 death of Mr Thomas Youk.
Mr Youk (52) suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, a severe and progressive disorder of the nervous system for which there is no cure. He was in a wheelchair, fed through a tube and forced to use a machine to help him breathe.
A former racecar driver, he was shown on CBS' "60 Minutes" receiving a lethal dose of potassium chloride from Kevorkian, who argued during his trial that it was a "mercy killing."
"The only medical method for ending the interminable suffering of patients such as Thomas Youk is to provide them with an injection to permanently end their suffering, though such injection will hasten death," Kevorkian's lawyer, Mr Mayer Morganroth, said in the appeal.
"Dr Kevorkian's intent in providing such medication was to ease this unbearable suffering, not to cause death. It is simply unconstitutional to deem such conduct murder," he said.
The Supreme Court ruled in a landmark 1997 decision that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide.
Kevorkian has said he helped more than 130 people take their lives. Before the Youk case, he had been acquitted of euthanasia and murder charges in three previous trials. In the previous cases, Kevorkian arranged for his "patients" to inject the drugs themselves, sometimes through a home-built contraption he called a "suicide machine."
By rejecting Kevorkian's appeal, the justices let stand a Michigan Court of Appeals ruling last year that upheld his conviction. Kevorkian will become eligible for parole on May 26th, 2007, his 79th birthday.