From LifeNews.com
The attorney for convicted assisted suicide advocate Jack
Kevorkian says his health has
deteriorated quickly since filing a third request for a pardon
weeks ago. Attorney Mayer Morganroth says Kevorkian telephoned
him from prison a short time ago with news from prison doctors
that that his liver enzymes are now triple of what is normal.
"I'm alarmed," Morganroth said of 77 year-old Kevorkian,
"because it now appears that the Hepatitis C Dr. Kevorkian
contacted while testing blood transfusions given to American
soldiers during Vietnam is attacking his liver." "I'm
fearful for Dr. Kevorkian because if his liver fails it leaves
only two avenues," Morganroth said. "Either a liver
transplant or death."
Last month, Morganroth submitted his third request for Michigan
Governor Jennifer Granholm to pardon or commit his sentence.
Kevorkian was convicted in April 1999 of killing Thomas Youk,
a Detroit-area man with Lou Gehrig's disease whose death was
shown on the CBS television show "60 Minutes." He
argued the murder was a euthanasia or mercy killing, but was
sentenced for 10 to 25 years in prison. He is not eligible
for parole until 2007 and both a state parole board and Michigan
Governor Jennifer Granholm declined to release him earlier
on two other requests in 2003 and 2004.
Kevorkian resides at the Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer,
Michigan. In a statement obtained by LifeNews.com, Morganroth
also said Kevorkian suffers from dangerously high blood pressure,
cardiovascular disease, temporal arteritis, peripheral arthritis,
adrenal insufficiency, chronic pulmonary obstruction disease
and cataracts.
Assisted suicide is not legal in Michigan and Kevorkian would
not be able to avail himself of the method of death he used
to kill the more than 150 people he claims to have aided in
ending their lives.
Kevorkian told MSNBC in September he would travel and visit
family if granted parole, but he insisted he would not practice
assisted suicide or encourages others to do so. Reporter Rita
Cosby asked him if he regretted the assisted suicide deaths
of more than 130 people, Kevorkian replied, "Well, I
do a little." Kevorkian also told Cosby that, had Terri
Schiavo been presented to him 10 years ago, he would have
taken her on as another assisted suicide case.
Michigan authors and Kevorkian friends Neal Nicol and Harry
Wylie say they have been helping Kevorkian to prepare a 300-page
manuscript, tentatively titled "The Life of Dr. Death."
Kevorkian has been shopping it around to publishers.
Oscar-winning director Barbara Kopple and producer Steve Jones
plan to begin filming a movie version in Michigan later this
year. Jones says Oscar winner Ben Kingsley would head the
short list of people he would like to play the imprisoned
coroner. Kingsley is a three time Oscar nominee who won the
award for best actor in 1982 for his role in the film Gandhi.
by Steven Ertelt
The Courier Mail reports:
Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically
ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they
evacuated hospitals.
As gangs of rapists and looters rampaged through wards in
the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision
to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed
could not make it out alive. One New Orleans doctor told how
she ``prayed for God to have mercy on her soul'' after she
ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives
of patients she had earlier fought to save.
Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital
orderly and local government officials. One emergency official,
William McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making
it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place
to die.''
Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and the identities of
medical staff concerned are being kept secret to prevent them
being made scapegoats for the events of last week. Their families
believe their confessions are an indictment of the appalling
failure of US authorities to help those in desperate need
after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands
of lives and making 500,000 people homeless. The doctor said
she did not know if she was doing the right thing. ``But I
did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the
most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was
right,'' she said. "I injected morphine into those patients
who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough,
I gave a double dose.'' The doctor, who fled her hospital
late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters,
said: "This was not murder, this was compassion. They
would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not
put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.''
The doctor said she had cancer patients who were in agony.
"In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death
process,'' she said. "We divided patients into three
categories: those who were traumatised but medically fit enough
to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying. "People
would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had
to make life-or-death decisions in a split-second. It came
down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.
"There were patients with 'do not resuscitate' signs.
Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several
days. But when the power went out, we had nothing. "The
pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters
were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand
these people were going to die anyway.''
Queensland doctor and navy reservist Paul Lukin, who was
in the first Australian medical team to fly into Banda Aceh
after the Asian tsunami, said standard medical and navy policy
when confronted with overwhelming disasters was to first treat
seriously ill patients who could be saved with available resources.
"We would not give an extra or double dose of morphine,''
he said.
By Caroline Graham and Jo Knowsley
