Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan pathologist known as “Dr. Death,” was convicted of second-degree murder in 1999 after personally injecting a terminally ill patient on camera, served eight years in a Michigan prison, was released on parole in June 2007, and died of a pulmonary thrombosis on June 3, 2011, at age 83. He had assisted in more than 130 deaths during the 1990s before the case that finally sent him to prison.
The Act That Changed Everything
For most of the 1990s, Kevorkian beat the charges brought against him. Detroit juries acquitted him in 1994 and again in 1996, and a Pontiac jury acquitted him later that same year after he appeared in court in colonial costume to protest being tried under old common law. Prosecutors kept losing because Kevorkian’s devices, the Thanatron and the Mercitron, were designed so the patient pressed the button or opened the valve. He supplied the means; the patient performed the act.
In September 1998, he abandoned that distinction. Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old Detroit man with ALS, was paralyzed and could not trigger a device himself. Kevorkian injected the lethal chemicals into Youk’s arm and videotaped it. Two months later, CBS aired the tape on “60 Minutes” alongside a Mike Wallace interview in which Kevorkian essentially dared prosecutors to charge him. They did.
The 1999 Murder Trial
Oakland County prosecutors charged Kevorkian with second-degree murder rather than assisted suicide, because Youk had not performed the final act. Michigan’s second-degree murder statute covers all murder that is not first degree and carries a penalty of life or any term of years.
Kevorkian represented himself before Judge Jessica Cooper, and it went badly. He could not mount the constitutional and medical-ethics defenses that trained lawyers had used in his earlier trials. The prosecution played the “60 Minutes” tape for the jury, turning his own recording into a confession. His medical license had already been stripped years earlier — the Michigan Board of Medicine suspended it in November 1991, and a California administrative law judge revoked his California license in April 1993 — so no medical-practice defense was available to him either. The jury convicted him, and Judge Cooper sentenced him to 10 to 25 years.
Eight Years in Prison
Kevorkian served his sentence at the Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer, Michigan. His health deteriorated inside. He dealt with hepatitis C and recurring respiratory problems. After eight years, he was paroled on June 1, 2007, at 79.
The parole ran two years and came with strict conditions. He agreed not to participate in any assisted suicides. He was barred from telling anyone how to build his devices. He could not provide care to anyone over 62 or to anyone with a disability. He had to check in weekly with a parole officer and live in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. A violation would have sent him back to serve the remainder of the 25-year maximum.
His Final Years
Kevorkian kept a public profile within the limits of parole. He lectured, appeared at universities, and in 2008 ran as an independent for the U.S. House in Michigan’s 9th Congressional District against Republican incumbent Joe Knollenberg. He received a small share of the vote.
His health kept slipping. He had long-running kidney trouble, and in May 2011 he was hospitalized at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, for pneumonia and kidney-related complications. He was briefly released, then checked back in on May 18 after a relapse. He died on June 3, 2011, at age 83, with Bach playing in his hospital room. The cause of death was a pulmonary thrombosis.
The Line His Case Drew
Kevorkian’s conviction stands as direct precedent that a physician who personally administers a lethal dose commits homicide, regardless of the patient’s consent. The right-to-die laws that have passed since are built around the exact distinction that sent him to prison. Oregon enacted the first Death with Dignity Act in 1994, and as of early 2026 more than a dozen jurisdictions, including California, Colorado, New Jersey, New York, and Washington, allow some form of medical aid in dying. In every one of them, a physician may prescribe a lethal dose to a terminally ill patient who meets the eligibility rules, but the patient must self-administer it. The doctor cannot push the plunger. That boundary was the one Kevorkian’s early devices respected and the one he crossed with Thomas Youk.