"Dr. Death" Jack Kevorkian dies

 Jack Kevorkian, a former Oakland County pathologist who was known as "Dr Death" for having helped more than 130 people end their lives, died on Friday morning in Royal Park, Michigan, at the age of 83, according to a report of Detnews.

Kevorkian, who had previously been diagnosed with liver cancer, had been hospitalized with kidney and respiratory problems for several weeks at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, according to his longtime attorney Geoffrey Fieger.

Fieger said at a press conference that he believes that if Kevorkian hadn't been so weak and infirmed that he might have made choice to end his life the way he helped others do so.

Kevorkian has been focused on death and dying long before he stirred a still-unsettled debate in U.S. over assisted suicide by helping sick and suffering people to end their lives with the help of a machine he devised that allowed the patient themselves to trigger an injection of a lethal drug.

Fieger described him as "a rare human being who can single- handedly take on an entire society by the scruff of its neck and force it to focus on the suffering of other human beings."

His admirers lauded him as a hero who allowed the terminally ill to die with dignity, while his critics described him as a cold- blood killer.

Kevorkian was charged with first-degree murder after he launched an assisted suicide campaign in 1990 by allowing Alzheimer's patient to kill themselves, but the charges were later dismissed.

He was finally convicted of murder in the second-degree in 1999 after being declared not guilty four times in Michigan, and was released in 2007 under a condition that he promised no longer assist in any more suicides.

After his release from prison, the doctor remained in the spotlight by giving occasional lectures and running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress in 2008. An HBO documentary on his life and a movie, "You Don't Know Jack", starring Al Pacino, brought him back into the limelight last year.

Doctor-assisted suicide essentially became law in Oregon in 1997 and in Washington state in 2009. The practice of doctors writing prescriptions to help terminally ill patients kill themselves was ultimately upheld as legal by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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