Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

12-5-90 Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan physician who assisted Janet Adkins in killing herself, was charged yesterday—six months after the fact—with first-degree murder. Kevorkian built a device that allows a person to inject a lethal dose of sodium pentathol into his or her veins. Adkins, who had Alzheimer’s disease and did not want to live in her debilitated condition, flew from the West Coast to Michigan, sought out Dr Kevorkian, made arrangements to use his machine, and killed herself. Actually, it’s not clear how to characterize what happened. Was it a suicide or a homicide? A suicide occurs when someone kills himself or herself. A homicide occurs when someone kills another person. Since Kevorkian has been charged with first-degree murder, the prosecutor must conceive of it as a homicide. But that’s odd, because nearly everyone calls Kevorkian’s device a “suicide machine”, which implies that it allows people to kill themselves. Kevorkian built the machine, installed it in a van, put the intravenous needle into Adkins’s arm, and told her which button to push if she wanted to kill herself. Query: Did he kill her (homicide) or did she kill herself (suicide), or both? If she killed herself, then the most Kevorkian can be charged with is assisting a suicide, which is illegal in some states (Michigan may be one of them). Perhaps assisted suicide and homicide are on a moral (and legal) par with one another. That’s not my main concern. What interests me is the conceptual question of how to describe (categorize, think of) what happened.