CNN: DA never called medical experts to testify in Katrina hospital deaths
In July, a grand jury decided not to indict one doctor and two nurses on second degree murder charges that they had taken actions to kill patients in their care at New Orleans' Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina. CNN reported on Sunday that the five medical experts lined up by the state to testify in front of the grand jury were never called to testify, even though all five experts had concluded that as many as nine patients had been deliberately killed. Here's what Art Caplan, one of the experts, told the network:
Arthur Caplan, the chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said it's inconceivable that the case is not going to go to trial.
"I was never called to the grand jury," said Caplan. "As far as I know, the grand jury never saw my reports. As far as I know, none of the reports prepared by these experts, who looked at all the cases, who were independent, and came to the conclusion that massive amounts of drugs were used as the cause of death and that they couldn't have been requested [by the patients], they had to be given involuntarily. That's evidence that I think a grand jury would want to be familiar with before it made its decision as to whether or not to proceed with an indictment.
"Now you can still get into a dispute about the evidence," Caplan added. "You can get into a dispute about the circumstances and all the rest of it, but at face value there is no other conclusion I think that's possible, other than these people -- or someone -- killed them."
CNN also quoted from the reports, which it obtained after filing a public records request:
Caplan wrote that there was no evidence any patient asked to be given assistance in dying, and no evidence that any consented to be given an overdose of medication to end their lives.
"In reviewing the facts and opinions, my conclusion is that the deaths of the nine persons at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans are all cases of active euthanasia," Caplan wrote. "Each person died with massive doses of narcotic drugs in their bodies."
Dr. Ann Pou, the doctor charged in the case, recently told Newsweek that painkillers and sedatives were administered to patients for comfort reasons only.
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The main question for this blog is not whether these cases constitute "active euthanasia" (i.e., whether the patients were deliberately and involuntarily killed) but whether active euthanasia could be justified under the circumstances. Surely that's under the purview of Art Caplan's testimony, given that he was called as a medical ethicist and not as a coroner.
- by Eli on Aug 28, 2007 at 4:13 PM | link
It seems as though Art went off on a tangent: The question was whether or not the patients were killed - especially whether their death was intended. I can't imagine why he even discussed the question of whether anyone asked to be killed or gave informed consent to be killed.
The doctor has always maintained that that there was no intent to kill. The Attorney General tried to make a case that she did intend to kill them.
As a Family Doctor, and after reviewing what little bit of data is available, there's only one patient that I might worry that the doctor's action hastened death.
It is very much to be expected that any of the patients would have died of their diseases in the same time frame. (Even for the one patient I wonder about - the man who couldn't be moved because of his size and immobility more than his other medical conditions - it's not unreasonable to believe that he died more of his disease than the size of the injections. His diabetes plus dehydration and the heat could have led to ketoacidosis and coma very rapidly. Especially if you add in self-smothering from his weight and the difficulties of blowing off extra CO2 in the hot, humid air.)
See my review of the pathologist's notes on the medical histories of the 9 patients in question http://www.lifeethics.org/www.lifeethics.org/2007/08/summary-of-forensics-reports-from-new.html
- by Beverly Nuckols on Aug 28, 2007 at 5:58 PM | link