The right thing was done:
A grand jury Tuesday declined to indict Dr. Anna Pou, the surgeon accused of killing four seriously ill patients in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Hopefully this saga has come to an end. Read more for extensive debate on the Anna Pou story.
Some blogosphere reactions -
PEU Report:
“The bad news is the grand jury declined to indict the doctor for second degree murder or conspiracy to commit murder. “Criminal doctors” was one leg of Carlyle’s two pronged defense. That a grand jury failed to bring charges against Dr. Anna Pou can’t be sitting well in the corporate offices on Pennsylvania Avenue. Now LifeCare may be held accountable for allowing uncredentialled providers access to their patients.”
Mary Johnson:
“But maybe now somebody will look up the food chain . . . at the hospital executives and local/state politicians who failed these patients . . . and these ‘health-care providers’ . . . . completely and utterly.”
Dr. Crippen:
“Dr Pou and Dr Munro have escaped prosecution. Dr Pou may yet have to face the American Civil Law vultures.
Personally, I remain profoundly uncomfortable with the actions that Dr Munro took. We may never know what Dr Pou and her nursing colleagues did or did not do.
But of one thing we can be sure. In cases such as this, the law is far too blunt an instrument.”
Anna Pou:
“I’m really putting Mr. Foti in God’s hands. I figure that he has to live with the decisions he’s made and I have been praying really hard, every day, that I can forgive him for all the pain and suffering that he has caused so many people that have been engaged in this case.”
Related posts:
- Dr. Anna Pou fights back
- Meet Anna Nicole Smith’s doctor
- Anna Nicole Smith: The medical blogosphere speculates
- Anna Pou speaks
- Walgreens charges $117 for a bottle of the same pills for which Costco charges $12
- Anna Nicole Smith’s psychiatrist
- Immunity for the Katrina nurses
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>> Someone doesn’t know what a strawman is.
Someone doesn’t know what palliative care is.
>>What about those witnesses’ statements was not credible?
“Only nurses give injections”
The “null hypothesis” or “presumption of innocence” would be that the doctor was trying to provide palliative care to dying patients under extraordinary circumstances. Anybody who knows anything about medicine and had a television understood what the docs went through.
Unfortunately, the other “null hypothesis” with regards to Louisiana elected officials and government service is incompetence and corruption. William Jefferson. Police, in uniform, looting stores for luxury items. And again, it was on TV.
So no, it’s not hard to believe that the docs did the best they could, and a corrupt Louisiana official took some wild statement and used it for self-serving purposes.
The jury ruled as it should.
This is obvious to everyone except you.
>>”What about those witnesses’ statements was not credible? The mere fact that they questioned another physician?”
To wit: the “witness” said he saw saw Dr. Pou takling with nurses, and one of the nurses appeared to be crying and also that he saw Dr. Pou with some syringes.
It wasn’t the fact that he questioned another physician, it was the fact that what he claimed to have seen and heard would not by any reasonable standard be considered criminal activity. He did not say he saw Dr. Pou administer drugs to patient and he did not say he heard anyone say they were planning to euthanize a patient.
Patients died at that hospital. There was no electric power, no air conditioning, it was summer, in New Orleans, no sewage, no sanitation, no food service, the streets were flooded, armed criminals were invading the hospital. The patients in question were non-ambulatory, bedridden, in some cases ventilator-dependent. The hospital had evacuated all of the patients who could be moved. In that setting under those conditions, which is worse than most people have ever experienced, some of those patients died while under the care of the doctors at that hospital. Were the patients sedated more than might have otherwise been necessary had the disaster not have occurred? It wouldn’t surprise me. Tell me, counselor, what else would anyone be able to do to make them more comfortable? And is it possible that under the total stress of those living conditions the double effect of sedation might have a higher morbidity and mortality? It wouldn’t surprise me at all; but just being there would have likely have done that, the conditions being so utterly degraded.
So what this doctor-witness says he thinks he saw really amounted to not much: speculation and heresay. That patients died doesn’t make for manslaughter. It makes for disaster.
And that Mr. Charles Foti chooses to take that and tries to make political hay from it makes for rank indecency.
CJD can join Foti and Nifong and Jefferson for lacking common decency. A cheerleader for obvious political grandstanding, trying to ruin the lives of those who did have the decency to try and help.
Does it come with the law degree, I don’t know…..?
Here’s a NOLA editorial:
http://blog.nola.com/jeff_crouere/2007/07/finally_justice_served_in_new.html
Then again, Foti would know all about lethal cocktails, wouldn’t he? He also knows about people dying under his “care”.
http://www.lagop.com/documents/Foti.pdf
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