Interim special

Current and former state senators said December 28 that they wre appalled Jack Kevorkian apparently has continued to assist in suicides only weeks after a bill was approved making the practice a felony.

It's insulting to our Legislature," said former senator John Kelly, D-Detroit, an Oakland University poltical science professor. Kevorkian has no respect for the law. He feels he is outside the law."

State senators earlier in December approved the bill which made assisted suicide a feloy punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The measure passed 28-7 and currently is in the state House of Representatives.

The outrage stems from two assisted suicides December 27. Kevorkian and his close friend, Dr. Goerges Reding, were present at both deaths.

The body of Franz-Johann Long, 53, of Bethlehem, Pa., was dropped off at 5:50 p.m. At Pontiac Osteopathic Hospital.

Michael Schwartz, one of Kevorkian's lawyers, said Long suffered from bladder cancer. Oakland County sheriff's deputies later confronted Kevorkian and Reding outside the Oakland County Medical Examiner's Office in Pontiac about 7:10 p.m. December 27 with the body of Mary Langford. Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, was wheeling Langford's body to the morgue.

Schwartz said Langford, 73, of Tampa, Fla., had undergone a masetctomy on her left breast and cancer had spread to her lungs. Autopsies on both bodies were scheduled for December 29.

A recent survey by Epic/MRA, a political lobbying firm in Lansing, found 59 per cent of Michigan residents favor assisted suicide.

But Robert Geake, R-Northville, and co-sponsor of the bill, said legal suicide should not be permitted en masse.

"I don't think it's good public policy," he said. Michigan has become a mecca for people who do not know any other way to end their suffering," Kelly said. Assisted suicide is banned in almost every state in the country," Kelly said.  They see Kevorkian as a way out."

Former senator Lana Pollack, D-Ann Arbor, said the bill is  unrealistic," and  offers no harmony and no solution." You don't want Kevorkian acting like a lone ranger out thre on the streets where desperate people see him as a solution to unbearable suffering," Pollack said.

But desperate people turn to desperate solutions, Outlawing it will only cause people to take matters into their own hands."

- via Pro-Life E News Canada