Justice & Law Quote by Jack Kevorkian

Kevorkian opens like a cross-examination, not a confession. The “First of all” is a reset button: he refuses the court’s framing and replaces it with his own moral premise. By asking for a show of hands - “Any of you think it is? Say so right now” - he drags an abstract statute into the realm of personal accountability. If you’re going to call this a crime, you don’t get to hide behind procedure; you have to own the cruelty out loud. The line lands because it makes the audience feel the heat of complicity.

The subtext is a dare aimed at the gap between private ethics and public law. Kevorkian is betting that most people, in their gut, recoil from prolonged suffering more than they fear a doctor’s deliberate intervention. So he reframes “assisted suicide” as “help” and “ending agony,” language that smuggles in tenderness and necessity while stripping away the stigma of self-destruction. “Suffering human” universalizes the patient, nudging listeners to imagine their parent, partner, future self.

Context sharpens the provocation: Kevorkian operated in the 1990s culture-war pressure cooker, when medicine’s growing power to prolong life collided with a legal system that treated intent as the bright line. “What are we doing here?” isn’t confusion; it’s an indictment of a process that can punish mercy while pretending it’s neutrality. He’s not arguing technicalities. He’s putting the jury - and the country - on trial for choosing rules over relief.