Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 6, 1990 TAG: 9006060240
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: DETROIT LENGTH: Medium
The last thing Janet Adkins, 54, told Dr. Jack Kevorkian on Monday was, "You just make my case known," he said. Then, she pressed a button on the contraption that released the lethal mixture.
A prosecutor said he would wait for autopsy results before deciding whether to charge Kevorkian, and will seek an injunction to prevent his using the device again.
The Portland, Ore., woman's husband defended his wife's right to die:
"It's not a matter of how long you live, but the quality of life you live, and it was her life and her decision," Ron Adkins told Portland's KATU-TV.
"She made that decision based upon the fact that the things she loved most - reading, literature, music - all that she couldn't do anymore."
Kevorkian said Adkins came to Michigan during the weekend to use his suicide device. He drove her in his van to a park Monday afternoon.
He and one of his relatives attached Adkins to a heart monitor, then put an intravenous tube in her arm.
The tube delivered a saline solution. Kevorkian said Adkins then pressed a button that injected thiopental, a coma-inducing drug, followed moments later by potassium chloride, which stops the heart within minutes.
He said she was unconscious in 25 seconds and died in five or six minutes.
"It simulates exactly the judicial executions that we do now . . . except with this device the person does it himself by pushing a button," Kevorkian told The Detroit News on Monday.
The doctor is a retired pathologist and an outspoken advocate of what he calls doctor-assisted suicide.
Some medical ethicists called the doctor's actions immoral.
"Physicians should not be killers, even in cases where the patient requests it and there is a compassionate reason behind the act," said Susan Wolf of the Hastings Center for bio-medical research in Briarcliff, N.Y. "They take an oath to do no harm, and taking a life is doing harm."
Kevorkian said in March that he expected to be prosecuted after the first use of his drug-injecting device. He also said he would not charge patients and that he might use it to take his own life someday.
Kevorkian could not be reached. The phone at his suburban Detroit office was repeatedly busy Tuesday.
After Adkins died, Kevorkian notified police. Oakland County Prosecutor Richard Thompson said he won't decide about charging the doctor until he gets an autopsy report and state police finish their investigation. The police have the device, Thompson added.
Kevorkian said Adkins came to Michigan with her husband and a friend, but they left before she died. In Oregon, providing the means to commit suicide is a felony, but Michigan has no law against suicide assisted by a physician.
Kevorkian said the Adkinses contacted him in October after learning about his device, and he recommended treatment with an experimental drug at a Seattle hospital.
"It didn't work," Ron Adkins said. "It was hard on us, all of us, because we've been mourning for an entire year knowing that this was what she had in mind."
The device itself - an aluminum frame with three suspended bottles and a small electric motor - is not illegal, said Gerald Poisson, assistant Oakland County prosecutor.
But in certain cases, the person who made it available to the suicide victim could be charged with homicide, he said Tuesday.
by CNB