The career of flamboyant assisted suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian is to become a HBO movie. Barry Levinson, who directed Rain Man and Good Morning Vietnam has reportedly recruited Al Pacino to star as Kevorkian.

Bioethicist Arthur Caplan is outraged, because Kevorkian, who helped more than 130 people to die between 1990 and 1998 before being convicted of murder, set back the cause of assisted suicide for years. In his view, Kevorkian is an egotistical "nut" who ran a "24-hour, meet-greet-and-annihilate service".

"Kevorkian was always about Jack as much as he was about the strangers he briefly met and dispatched. When I asked him once if he were aware that one of his victims had a long history of severe depression and had spent many years in a psychiatric hospital, he snorted and replied, ‘How am I supposed to know all the details of her life?’ Far be it from the doctor to cloud his assessment of a person's request to die with the details of the person's life."

Caplan says that assisted suicide movements in Oregon and Washington state succeeded because they distanced themselves from the grotesque antics of Kevorkian. ~ Philadelphia Inquirer, June 8