In People v. Kevorkian, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that neither the state nor the federal constitution protects a right to commit suicide, that helping someone end their life is not murder under Michigan common law when the person performs the final act themselves, and that a state may still criminalize assisted suicide as a separate felony. Those three holdings, decided together, drew the legal line between assisting a death and causing one — a line that shaped every physician-assisted suicide case that followed, including two U.S. Supreme Court decisions three years later.
The Two Deaths Behind the Case
Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a Michigan pathologist, began publicly helping people end their lives in 1990. The Michigan Board of Medicine suspended his license in November 1991, and he kept going. The prosecution that reached the state supreme court grew out of two deaths in 1991: Sherry Miller, who had multiple sclerosis, and Marjorie Wantz.
The two deaths were not the same, and the difference became the case. Miller used Kevorkian’s carbon monoxide device herself; he supplied the gas cylinder and mask and showed her how to use it, but she activated it. Wantz died from multiple drugs delivered through an intravenous system Kevorkian set up in her arm, and the medical examiner classified the manner of death as homicide.
Prosecutors charged Kevorkian with two counts of murder. A lower court dismissed both, reasoning that because suicide itself was not a crime in Michigan, helping someone commit suicide could not be murder either. The prosecution appealed.
What the Michigan Supreme Court Held
No Constitutional Right to Suicide
The court found nothing in the Michigan Constitution — or, drawing on U.S. Supreme Court reasoning in cases like Roe v. Wade and Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, in federal due process or liberty guarantees — that protected a right to commit suicide. Because no such right existed, there could be no derivative right to receive help committing it. That closed the constitutional door on Kevorkian’s principal defense.
Assisting a Suicide Is Not Murder
On the murder charges, the court reached a conclusion that surprised many observers. Providing someone with the means to commit suicide, it held, does not constitute murder under Michigan common law. That overturned a 1920 Michigan Supreme Court decision, People v. Roberts, which had treated a husband who provided poison to his suffering wife as a murderer.
The 1994 court drew a new line. There is a legal difference, it said, between participating in the events leading up to a suicide and performing the final act that causes death. Giving someone a device they use to kill themselves sits on one side of that line. Injecting lethal drugs into someone yourself sits on the other. Under that reasoning, murder charges tied to Miller’s death, where she activated the device, could not stand. Wantz’s death, where Kevorkian appeared to have administered the drugs directly, raised the harder question of where assistance ends and killing begins.
The Assisted Suicide Statute Was Constitutional
While rejecting the murder theory, the court simultaneously upheld a Michigan statute that made assisted suicide a separate felony. The legislature had enacted the temporary ban in 1992, directly in response to Kevorkian’s activities. Codified at MCL 752.1027, it made it a crime to intentionally provide someone with the physical means to commit suicide, punishable by up to four years in prison, a fine of up to $2,000, or both.1Michigan Legislature. MCL – Section 752.1027 – Assistance to Suicide (Excerpt) The court found the statute consistent with both the Michigan and U.S. constitutions. So while Kevorkian could not be convicted of murder for helping Miller, he remained exposed to prosecution under the assisted suicide law.
Michigan later replaced the temporary ban with a permanent statute, MCL 750.329a, enacted in 1998 and still in force. It carries stiffer penalties — up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000, or both — and reaches anyone who knowingly provides the means for suicide, participates in the act, or helps plan it. The law explicitly excludes withholding or withdrawing medical treatment, preserving the well-established right of patients to refuse care.2Michigan Legislature. MCL – Section 750.329a
The Line the Court Drew, and What Happened When Kevorkian Crossed It
The distinction between providing means and performing the final act was not just a legal abstraction. Prosecutors tried Kevorkian multiple times in the years after the 1994 ruling and struggled to convict him, because in each case the person who died had triggered the mechanism.
Then in 1998 he administered a lethal injection directly to Thomas Youk, a man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He videotaped the act and gave the footage to CBS’s 60 Minutes, which broadcast it nationally on November 22, 1998. This was no longer assisted suicide. It was euthanasia, and it landed on the wrong side of the line the court had drawn.
Three days after the broadcast, prosecutors charged Kevorkian with first-degree murder and aiding and abetting a suicide. At the 1999 trial he represented himself and called no witnesses. The proceeding lasted two days. The jury acquitted him of first-degree murder but convicted him of second-degree murder and delivery of a controlled substance. He was sentenced to 10 to 25 years, served eight, and was paroled in June 2007.
How the Ruling Shaped Federal Law
People v. Kevorkian did not stay a Michigan story. The U.S. Supreme Court took up the same constitutional question in two companion cases decided on the same day in 1997.
Washington v. Glucksberg
In Washington v. Glucksberg, the Court held that Washington State’s ban on assisted suicide did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Applying its test for fundamental rights, the Court asked whether the claimed right was “objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and found the opposite: Anglo-American common law had punished or disapproved of assisted suicide for more than 700 years, and that rejection continued in modern statutes across nearly every state. The asserted right to assistance in committing suicide, the Court concluded, “is not a fundamental liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause.” The Court cited People v. Kevorkian as evidence of how states broadly disapproved of suicide and assisted suicide across multiple areas of law.3Justia Law. Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997)
Vacco v. Quill
The companion case, Vacco v. Quill, took up an equal protection argument: if patients can legally refuse life-sustaining treatment and die, doesn’t a ban on assisted suicide treat similarly situated people differently? The Court rejected that reasoning. Refusing treatment and taking a lethal drug are fundamentally different acts. A patient who refuses a ventilator dies from the underlying disease; a patient who takes a lethal prescription dies from the medication. Intent differs too. A patient refusing treatment may desperately want to live and simply wants to stop invasive procedures, while a doctor who prescribes a lethal drug “must, necessarily and indubitably, intend primarily that the patient be made dead.” The distinction between letting someone die and making them die, the Court said, is “important, logical, rational, and well established.”4U.S. Reports (via Library of Congress). Vacco v. Quill
Gonzales v. Oregon
A separate federal question remained after Glucksberg and Vacco: could the federal government use drug regulation to shut down states that chose to allow assisted death? Oregon had passed the Death with Dignity Act in 1994. In 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a directive declaring that prescribing drugs for assisted suicide was not a “legitimate medical purpose” under the Controlled Substances Act, which would have allowed the DEA to revoke the registrations of Oregon doctors who participated.
In Gonzales v. Oregon (2006), the Supreme Court ruled against the Attorney General, holding that the Controlled Substances Act “does not allow the Attorney General to prohibit doctors from prescribing regulated drugs for use in physician-assisted suicide under state law permitting the procedure.”5U.S. Reports (via Library of Congress). Gonzales v. Oregon, 546 U.S. 243 (2006) State authority to regulate medical practice survived, and other states were free to enact aid-in-dying laws without federal drug-scheduling interference.
Why the Ruling Still Governs Aid-in-Dying Laws
More than a dozen U.S. jurisdictions now permit some form of medical aid in dying, including California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. Illinois signed its law in December 2025, and New York’s governor signed its Medical Aid in Dying Act in February 2026.6New York State Senate. NY State Senate Bill 2025-S138 Montana’s authorization comes from a 2009 state supreme court decision rather than legislation.
Every one of those statutes builds in a requirement that traces directly to the line Kevorkian was ultimately convicted for crossing: the patient must self-administer the medication. No physician may inject or otherwise deliver the lethal dose. Oregon’s law, the model for most others, layers additional safeguards on top: the patient must be at least 18, mentally capable, and diagnosed with a terminal illness expected to cause death within six months; two physicians must confirm the diagnosis; the patient must make two oral requests at least 15 days apart and a signed written request witnessed by two people; a psychological evaluation is required if either physician suspects impaired judgment; and the attending physician must discuss alternatives including hospice and pain management.7State of Oregon. Frequently Asked Questions – Death with Dignity Act
The architecture is the one People v. Kevorkian set in place. There is no constitutional right to suicide, so legislatures decide. Providing the means is not murder, so states can permit it under safeguards. Performing the final act is a different thing entirely, so no state law lets a physician do it. Every aid-in-dying law of the last three decades sits inside the space the 1994 ruling defined.