'Dr. Death' brings crowd to life with speech

Dr. Jack Kevorkian spoke at Kutztown University over the weekend on the topic of "Civil Rights, Civil Disobedience and Criminal Justice."

From a story in The Pottstown Mercury:

Kevorkian's speech focused on what he says is the little-known, rarely discussed Ninth Amendment to the Constitution. Kevorkian believes the amendment provides citizens so many individual rights that scholars and the government purposefully guard its meaning from the general public.

"The Ninth Amendment makes all other amendments superfluous, including the Fourteenth," he said.

Kevorkian argued that validation of the Ninth Amendment would open the floodgates of personal rights, and that no governmental body, including the U.S. Supreme Court, wants citizens to recognize the rights the amendment affords.

"The Ninth Amendment has never been used in 235 years. Why? Because if that amendment becomes known and if we had an honest Supreme Court, which we don't, all constitutional issues would be easily solved.

"You could say anything you wanted, any time you wanted, provided you've got the discipline to use it correctly, and this is a problem because we have been trained to be undisciplined people — the most undisciplined people in the world," Kevorkian said.

But he reserved most of his commentary for assailing government, lawyers and anyone he believes trumps the rights of Americans, referring to the Supreme Court numerous times as "the tyrant."

Read the full story in The Pottstown Mercury.