(Note – I’ve made slight edits from yesterday’s original version of this entry to eliminate some ambiguity in places. Hopefully, these minor edits fix that ambiguity.)
During the last week of July, the news broke that a grand jury refused to indict Dr. Anna Pou on charges related to the deaths of four patients in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A couple critical voices buried in the coverage were easily missed. For example, Arthur Caplan, who frequently disagrees with disability activists (which is fair enough, but he’s also been known to misrepresent what we say to his larger audience at MSNBC) and doesn’t welcome our input into bioethics discussions, expressed his disappointment over the failure to indict:
“There is evidence that merits a trial and consideration of the claims and counter claims of all parties involved,” Caplan said in an e-mail response to written questions. He was out of the country.
“I don’t know and would not predict what the outcome of a trial would be, but I think there is more than enough evidence to justify a trial,” he wrote. Caplan said in his report for the state that he reviewed nine deaths at the hospital.
“Each person died with massive doses of narcotic drugs in their bodies,” he wrote. “There is no evidence of consent. There is no documentation or record of any request on the part of any patient for assistance in dying.”
Had Caplan known at the time that even more important evidence and testimony allegedly never reached the Grand Jury, he might not have been surprised at the outcome.
Over the weekend, there were disturbing allegations that the grand jury never got to hear important testimony – testimony supporting the allegations that patients were indeed intentionally killed by Pou and possibly others:
A New Orleans grand jury that declined to indict a doctor on charges that she murdered patients in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina never heard testimony from five medical experts brought in by the state to analyze the deaths.
All five concluded that as many as nine patients were victims of homicide.
In detailed, written statements, the five specialists — whose expertise includes forensic medicine, medical ethics and palliative care — determined that patients at Memorial Medical Center had been deliberately killed with overdoses of drugs after Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005.
The experts weren’t the only ones whose accounts weren’t heard by the grand jury:
Family members of another one of the patients, Elaine Nelson, hired their own forensic expert to explore why the 90-year-old woman died. The report alarmed her son, Craig, a New Orleans lawyer.
“It showed that Mom had received on September 1 eight milligrams of morphine, which was four times the amount that she was prescribed by her doctor, and which was a lethal amount that was certainly enough to kill her,” Nelson said.
Nelson said neither he nor his sister Kathy, a registered nurse who was with their mother after Katrina until guards ordered her to leave the hospital, were called before the grand jury. Their forensic expert wasn’t called either.
Nelson has filed a lawsuit against the hospital owner and others. He said he refused a settlement offer because he wants the truth to come out, especially now that Jordan has closed the case. Nelson said he is disappointed in the way the grand jury was conducted.
“I think they’d want to hear as much evidence as possible to make a well-informed decision,” he said.
In spite of the gleeful applause coming out from organizations like the American Medical Association, the suspicion that maybe this DA presented a case in a way that was guaranteed to lose serves no one. It doesn’t serve the families who want answers. It doesn’t serve the reputation of Anna Pou, who will never be really free of the allegations if her “exoneration” depended on a tainted process.
I find myself in the odd position of agreeing with Art Caplan – although it’s been happening more recently – when he said there is “more than enough evidence to justify a trial.”
In the course of such a trial, the guilt or innocence of Pou could have been argued before a jury. And even if found guilty, a jury of peers that lived through the nightmarish conditions of Katrina would have been ideally suited to decide if the extreme circumstances were mitigating enough to soften its judgement.
Speaking of Caplan, given his stance on the failure to indict in the Katrina deaths, I suspect he and I might be on the same page in regard to the AMA’s move to exploit the publicity surrounding Pou and Katrina. In the same article linked above, it was revealed the AMA plans to “develop model legislation to shield physicians from civil or criminal liability when caring for patients in a declared disaster area.”
Sweet. I am sure the police, who had to deal with the mess out on the streets during and after Katrina would love the same deal. But maybe they don’t have a lot to worry about – maybe no one in positions of authority has anything to worry about.
In the course of researching this, I realized that it’s easy to miss the bigger context of the current events in New Orleans. It’s possible that the less-than-stellar performance is par for the course in this area.
The latest news indicates that prosecutorial blunders may result in effectively ruining the case of police officers facing trial for shooting a man with developmental disabilities in the back during Katrina.
One has to wonder if there are cases in which the District Attorney there is actually playing to win. –Stephen Drake