Its not clear how he came to that conclusion, but since he'd based his whole life around it, you'd hope it wasn't an unexamined leap of faith. Maybe he came to it empirically, but how does one determine the value of an unexamined life without first examining it?
Maybe he went up to a bunch of random strangers, and asked them to take a long hard look at themselves. Maybe they all said "Damn, I was pretty happy with my life before, but now that you ask, I realize its shit. Thanks a lot asshole, now excuse me while I go kill myself."
The point is, only the ignoramus can say whether the unexamined life is worth living, but if you ask him to think about it, he won't be ignorant anymore. Maybe if Socrates had taken a second look at his worldview, he might have changed it to say "the unexamined life is not worth living, once examined".
Near the end, he was convicted by the state of Athens for corrupting the youth and committing acts of impiety; these charges actually do refer to his habit of forcing people to examine their lives. Upon sentencing, he was given the opportunity to accept as punishment either exile from Athens or a vow of silence, instead he chose neither, and said "the unexamined life is not worth living".
He tried to base his whole life around that philosophy, never questioning it to the bitter end; but if he'd really been true to it, maybe he would have taken a look at himself and said, "upon further examination, I'm gonna change my stance on that one", and let the ignorant masses enjoy their bliss. Instead he accepted a sentence of death by poison hemlock.
He drank the hemlock out of a goblet, and it slowly made his whole body numb until he passed out then died. Couldn't they have just gotten him drunk instead? That might have brought him around to the whole pro-oblivion, pro-numbness worldview, it always works for me; then again, I might really be fucking myself with that.
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