A juror talks about being on a medical malpractice case
This blog does not tend to give jurors on malpractice cases very much credit. Here’s one who sounds pretty reasonable – and I’m not just saying this because they found in favor of the physician:
Obvious attempts to play on our sympathies (chemotherapy side effects listed repeatedly; three young children introduced to the jury; the horrific first-person account of a stage four cancer diagnosis; fears of reoccurence and secondary cancers; a lawyer struggling not to burst into tears at the end of a closing argument) didn’t make for easy listening. It didn’t help with meeting the burden of proof, either. Even though the threshold is lower in civil cases (“”by a preponderance of the evidence” -— more likely than not, instead of beyond a reasonable doubt) it still needs to be met.
The case boiled down to a single question: was a doctor negligent because he failed to order a chest x-ray?
This is the question that took three weeks, multiple expert witnesses, subpoenaed doctors, dozens of medical records, copies of phone bills, and a couple of hours of deliberation to answer . . .
. . . This makes me think most cases aren’t about punishing bad actors, they are about a broken system. They have very little do to with science but a lot to do with the modern practice of medicine, because they are about money.
Turns out the doctor we didn’t find negligent has made two malpractice payments in the past ten years. The expert witness peripherally involved in treating the plaintiff (and who was called by the plaintiff to testify) made four.
(via Universal Hub)
