Echoes in Eternity

Dr. Kevorkian was freed a month ago after serving 8 years for assisting a person in his own suicide. Theodore Dalrymple has an excellent job offer for him here.

Before he turned his attention to mercy killing, Kevorkian argued for a new branch of medicine—namely, physiological experimentation on those condemned to death and about to be executed. His oddity is suggested not merely by the proposal itself, but by his surprise that his colleagues did not jump at it, and instead condemned it roundly. He attributed their resistance to conservatism, this being a pejorative term, of course.

Now it so happens that on the very day on which Kevorkian went free, 310 prisoners in Italy, condemned to life imprisonment for murder, petitioned the Italian president, requesting the reinstatement of the death penalty. An imprisoned chief of the Sicilian Mafia, Carmelo Musumeci, was the prime mover behind the petition, which read in part: “We ask that our life sentences be transformed into a death sentence. Our life is totally useless and means infinite suffering: a sentence that makes the future the same as the past, a past that crushes the present and eliminates any hope for the future.”

Surely there is an opportunity here for international cooperation of the best kind? It has long seemed paradoxical that many of those most strenuously opposed to the death penalty most fervently favor euthanasia, and not always the voluntary kind. It is seldom that such an ideological paradox can so neatly be resolved.

Avanti, Dr. Kevorkian! You have new worlds to conquer, especially since a condition of your parole is to take no part in euthanasia or assisted suicide. A change of jurisdictions would be just the thing. And I am sure that Signor Musumeci, as a small token of appreciation for being put out of his misery, would be happy to be experimented upon.