Today in History: Dr. Jack Kevorkian carries out his first publicly assisted suicide
Today is Wednesday, June 4, the 155th day of 2025. There are 210 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On June 4, 1990, Dr. Jack Kevorkian carried out his first publicly assisted suicide, helping Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Alzheimer's patient from Portland, Oregon, end her life in Oakland County, Michigan.
Also on this date:
In 1812, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its first war declaration, approving by a vote of 79-49 a declaration of war against Britain.
In 1919, Congress approved the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which said that the right of Americans to vote 'shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.' (The amendment was then sent to the states for ratification.)
In 1940, during World War II, the Allied military completed the evacuation of more than 338,000 troops from Dunkirk, France.
Also in 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared in a speech to the House of Commons: 'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.'
In 1942, the World War II naval Battle of Midway began, which resulted in a decisive American victory against Japan and marked a turning point in the war in the Pacific.
In 1986, Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty in Washington to conspiring to deliver national defense information to Israel. (Sentenced to life in prison, Pollard would be released on parole in November 2015.)
In 1989, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pro-democracy demonstrators and dozens of soldiers are estimated to have been killed when Chinese troops crushed a seven-week-long protest held by occupying demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
In 1998, a federal judge sentenced Terry Nichols to life in prison without parole for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people.
Today's Birthdays: Actor Bruce Dern is 89. Golf Hall of Famer Sandra Haynie is 82. Singer-actor Michelle Phillips is 81. Jazz musician Paquito D'Rivera is 77. Actor Parker Stevenson is 73. Actor Keith David is 69. Singer El DeBarge is 64. Opera singer Cecilia Bartoli is 59. R&B singer Al B. Sure! is 57. Actor Scott Wolf is 57. Comedian Horatio Sanz is 56. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, is 54. Actor Noah Wyle is 54. Actor Angelina Jolie is 50. Actor-comedian T.J. Miller is 44. Olympic figure skating gold medalist Evan Lysacek is 40.
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Newsweek
31 minutes ago
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Senator Says War Powers Resolution Against Trump Will Have GOP Support
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Wall Street Journal
39 minutes ago
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The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
History shows prosecuting officials challenging ICE raids won't be easy
President Trump's promised retribution against what he has called the 'core of the Democrat Power Center' includes siccing thousands of ICE agents on 'blue cities.' The assault has already led to the prosecution of public officials who challenged his abusive immigration seizures. But the Trump administration will likely lose those cases, thanks to the strong American tradition of jury resistance, sometimes called nullification, dating to before the Civil War. In New Jersey, Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) was indicted for allegedly interfering with the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka during an immigration protest rally at an ICE detention center. If convicted of the two forcible felonies, McIver would face a maximum sentence of eight years. McIver denies the accusations, pointing out that she had a legal right to inspect the facility as a member of Congress. She has raised the Constitution's speech and debate clause as a defense. In Wisconsin, the Trump administration brought criminal charges against Milwaukee County Court Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly preventing the arrest of a migrant in her courtroom. Dugan pleaded not guilty and moved to dismiss the case on the basis of judicial immunity. McIver's and Dugan's defenses are robust and may well prevail. But even if the prosecutors manage to overcome the immunity arguments, they will still have to face juries in Newark and Milwaukee, two of the heavily Democratic cities reviled by Trump. As detailed in my book, 'Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial,' American juries have historically refused to enforce unpopular laws against sympathetic defendants, in cases far more extreme than McIver's or Dugan's. In September 1851, shortly after the passage of the infamous Fugitive Slave Act, a band of slavehunters from Maryland, holding a federal warrant and under the leadership of a deputy U.S. marshal, attempted to apprehend four alleged runaways near the village of Christiana, Pennsylvania. When the posse's presence was discovered, the local Black community, along with some white allies, rallied to the defense of the fugitives and drove it away in a hail of rocks and bullets. One would-be kidnapper was killed in the melee, and the deputy marshal was humiliated. The fugitives escaped to Canada with the assistance of Frederick Douglass. The Millard Fillmore administration obtained indictments against 41 defendants — 36 Black and five white — accusing them of forming a 'traitorous combination' to 'prevent the execution' of the Fugitive Slave Act. The formal charge was treason, which carried the death penalty. The first defendant brought to trial — ironically, in Philadelphia's Constitution Hall — was a white miller named Castner Hanway. The prosecutors wrongly claimed that Hanway had been a mastermind of the rebellion, because they could not believe Black people capable of organizing a successful resistance against heavily armed whites. Hanway was represented by Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pa.), one of the great abolition advocates of his time and later author of the 13th Amendment. Stevens put on a defense that emphasized the frequent 'kidnapping and carrying away of colored persons' to nearby Maryland. As an explanation for the resistance, he noted the seizure of 'Black people … by force and violence and great injury and malice, without authority from any person on earth.' It took the jury only 15 minutes to acquit Hanway. Recognizing the futility of proceeding, the prosecution eventually dropped the charges against all defendants. Also in 1851, an alleged fugitive named Shadrach Minkins was arrested in Boston by agents operating under the Fugitive Slave Act. He was hustled into a federal courtroom where abolitionist lawyers volunteered to represent him. As the court convened the next day, about 20 Black men shoved their way through the doors and carried Minkins into the street. Onlookers cheered while 'two powerful fellows hurried him through the square,' later to be taken by wagon to Canada. Two of the most important leaders of Boston's free Black community were arrested for violating the Fugitive Slave Act: a prominent merchant named Lewis Hayden and attorney Robert Morris, one of the first Black lawyers in the U.S., as well as a white newspaper editor named Elizur Wright. All three defendants were represented by Richard Henry Dana, author of the memoir 'Two Years before the Mast,' and scion of one of Boston's oldest families. Despite substantial evidence of the defendants' participation in the rescue, there were no convictions, with two acquittals and a hung jury. As tensions increased between North and South, there were fizzled prosecutions in Syracuse, Milwaukee, again in Boston, and elsewhere. Even when prosecutions succeeded, sentencing judges could be unusually lenient. More important than any of the individual outcomes was the political movement built around the Fugitive Slave Act trials. Before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, many northerners were content to condemn enslavement from a distance, expressing disapproval but taking no action to oppose it. Afterward, the repeated arrests of alleged runaways and the trials that followed, of both fugitives and rescuers, made it impossible to ignore the federal government's intrusive role in enforcing human bondage. The McIver and Dugan prosecutors will have to contend with potential jurors appalled by Trump's indiscriminate pursuit of migrants, just as jurors in antebellum Boston and Philadelphia were appalled by the kidnapping of fugitives and arrests of rescuers. Defense counsel will surely highlight the hypocrisy of prosecuting McIver and Dugan for minor incidents, versus Trump's mass pardons of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. In the 1850s, northern opposition to the spread of slavery, sharpened by confrontations with slave hunters and federal marshals, led to Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860. Will the prosecution of Democratic officeholders and the arrests of countless migrants by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have the same impact on the mid-term elections of 2026? Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He is the author of 'Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial' and other books on abolitionist lawyers and political trials.
