Huge purple, grape-like masses are what a man named Richard Chinn saw under a patient's chin when he went to work for a hospital. This patient was diagnosed with cancer and those huge masses were the cancerous tumor. When this man ate, the cancerous growth began to pick up the food, whatever he didn't swallow quickly. When it began to grow to the size of a grapefruit, or larger, doctors would amputate it. However, this didn't do it much justice, because the growth would simply return. Amputation after amputation made the patient very uncomfortable and he wanted to take his own life. He and his family asked doctors several times to put him out of his suffering, and even went to court, but were still told "no." This man's life no longer made sense, he suffered miserably and the cancer would never go away. Eventually he got ammonia and instead of trying to resuscitate him, they finally left him alone (Chinn). If euthanasia had been legal, then this suffering man could have ended his pain sooner, but due to complications in the legal system, his life was put on hold for too long. Euthanasia is defined as a painless, happy and easy death, which comes from the Greek words Eu Thanatos. Looking back to ancient Greece and Rome, euthanasia was practiced regularly. If they saw a person suffering miserably and could do nothing for him, they would quickly end his life by giving him poison. However, over time religion increased and the life of a human being was considered sacred. For this reason, euthanasia was slowly portrayed as wrong ("The Controversy"). There are two main types of euthanasia: passive and active. Although both are illegal in every state except Oregon, passive euthanasia is easier for people to accept. The passive form involves taking a person off their life support and letting them die naturally, while the active form means ending a suffering person's life prematurely, by helping them to die, with an overdose of drugs (A Glossary on Euthanasia). Although euthanasia is not widely accepted, nor legal, there are people who try to break the rules. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, was convicted of first-degree murder in March 1999 and will spend 10 to 25 years in prison. He injected a man named Thomas Youk with a deadly level of medicine and killed him.