by Rand Richards Cooper

About the author: Rand Richards Cooper is a fiction writer who has taught at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.

I’m looking for an argument with Jack Kevorkian; or rather, for one against him. Life for Kevorkian lately has come laden with satisfying vindications. Weary prosecutors, having failed to convince three Michigan juries that Kevorkian’s eagerness in assisting suicide is a crime, now seem ready to toss in their cards and go home. Once dubbed “Dr. Death” by medical school classmates for his unseemly obsession with terminal illness, the ex-pathologist stands redeemed and embraced as a pioneering American hero. “Jack’s doing something that is right,” says his lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger. “Everyone instinctively understands...