TJP

 

Unequal Justice: Katrina Euthanasia

By Byron A. Ellis – August 30, 2009

If you killed dogs, you’re put away like Michael Vick. If you killed patients, as apparently some physicians did in New Orleans during Katrina, you’re given a pass. Dr. Edwin Cook, who worked at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, told ProPublica “I gave her medicine so I could get rid of her faster, get the nurses off the floor.” He further stated, “There's no question I hastened her demise.”

ProPublica is an independent nonprofit investigative organizations that will publish a report on the post Katrina incident at Memorial Medical Center in Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine and currently features Sheri Fink’s article The Deadly Choice at Memorial on its web site.

On Friday, The Dallas News reported that Cook defended his decision to increase the morphine drip to Jannie Burgess, 79, who was dying of uterine cancer and kidney failure.

In spite of Cook’s public confession, The Huffington Post reports “Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell said Friday he would not reopen a probe launched by his predecessor, Charles Foti, in which another doctor and two nurses were arrested on charges of second-degree homicide. A grand jury declined to indict them.”

Unlike, Dr. Cook, the other doctor, Ana Pou, and the two nurses denied that they killed patients with overdoses of a "lethal cocktail" of sedative-painkiller mix. According to ProPublica, “Anna Pou, defended herself on national television, saying her role was to ‘help’ patients ‘through their pain,’ a position she maintains today.”

Dr. Pou, since Katrina has helped write and pass three laws in Louisiana that offer immunity to health care professionals from most civil lawsuits for work in future disasters. According to ProPublica, the laws encourage prosecutors to await the findings of a medical panel before deciding whether to prosecute medical professionals. Which is akin to asking a panel of dog-fighter owners if their colleagues were negligible when dogs die in dogfights.

ProPublica notes that “Puo has argued that informed consent is impossible during disasters and that doctors need to be able to evacuate the sickest or most severely injured patients last — along with those who have Do Not Resuscitate orders — an approach that she and her colleagues used as conditions worsened after Katrina.” Her logic would lessen the survival probability of anyone with a Do Not Resuscitate consent and the sickest in disasters.

In comparing incidents of dog or animal abuse with post Katrina patient abuse, it appears that the public and the justice system in the United States place greater value on the lives of dogs than on the life of indigent patients.

However, any justice system that is grossly inequitable is a disservice to society and eventually will disintegrate.

SAVE DARFUR