Judge Bans Doctor From Using Any Suicide Device

A retired pathologist who had envisioned setting up a “unique medical practice” of assisting suicides was banned Tuesday from ever again using any device to help end human life.

A Circuit Court judge issued a permanent injunction barring Dr. Jack Kevorkian from assisting people who want to die, and harshly criticized his role in helping a terminally ill Oregon woman kill herself last year.

“There is reason to condone dying with dignity,” said Oakland County Circuit Judge Alice L. Gilbert, who said her ruling would have no bearing on the rights of terminally ill patients to refuse medical treatment.

But she said planned death must be carried out under the proper circumstances and by “persons of competence and integrity.” Kevorkian, she said, flagrantly violated his profession’s standards and codes of conduct and is considered a “menace” by his peers.

The physician’s attorney, contending that the judge had made a moral judgment and not a legal one, said he would appeal.

Kevorkian, a 62-year-old Royal Oak, Mich., resident, said he was astonished by Gilbert’s “vile harangue” against him. “What was said here was said when the first doctor dissected bodies in the Middle Ages,” Kevorkian said, referring to Gilbert’s sharply worded ruling, which referred to his “bizarre behavior” and said he was motivated by self-interest.

A temporary injunction barring Kevorkian from assisting in suicides had been issued June 8, four days after he used his so-called suicide machine to help Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease, kill herself.

The suicide device, which has been in the court’s custody since June, consists of a frame holding three chemical solutions that feed into a common intravenous tube controlled by a switch and a timer.

In earlier court statements, Kevorkian said Adkins activated the switch that started the device, but he admitted inserting the intravenous needle into her arm and shaking the bottles containing the solutions so that they would flow properly.

Oakland County prosecutor Richard Thompson filed a civil lawsuit seeking the permanent injunction after murder charges against Kevorkian were dismissed.

Ruling on evidence presented at a three-day trial in January, Gilbert declared that Kevorkian was not professionally qualified to evaluate Adkins’ physical or emotional condition and apparently made no attempt to examine her, take a medical history, obtain consultation or conduct laboratory tests--all requisites of accepted medical practice.

“Dr. Kevorkian envisions himself as a charitable maverick, destined to revolutionize the practice of medicine,” she said. “His peers look upon him as a menace that threatens the existence of the medical profession and those creeds that have endured since the time of Hippocrates. This court finds it difficult to believe that the physicians of the past 2,000 years have been blind to need and only Dr. Kevorkian has the vision to lead them out of the darkness.”