I was just about to beat my phone at backgammon for the third consecutive game when the doors to the hallway opened. About forty people were standing in the hallway waiting to get into the room.
My phone suddenly vanished and my posture immediately improved.
All of the advice Vinny gave me on our walk to court began to run through my head. Smile and try to make eye contact. As they file into the room, I’m smiling and looking at each one of them. No one seems to care. A couple of people hesitated, glanced at me and then glanced at the plaintiffs. They all searched around for a place to sit. There were three rows of benches behind a gate separating the visitors from the courtroom. Forty people were herded into those seats with Hitch as their sheepdog.
“Slide in. Slide in, will ya?”
I was waiting for him to pull out his billy club so that his pants would fall down.
It suddenly became very uncomfortable now that 40 people were all sitting in a room with their attention focused on me. Obviously, I didn’t want to be messing with my cell phone, so I pulled out the medical records and began to read them. I knew what most of the records said already, but I wanted to look busy. I took notes on a legal pad, not because of some earth shattering discovery in the chart, but so I could remember my thoughts and write about the whole experience later. They couldn’t see what I was writing, but I looked busy.
I cast another glance over at the plaintiffs. They were sitting in the same position, staring at the opposite wall with their hands folded.
Everyone sat in silence for the next 30 minutes. Sniffles, coughs and shuffling newspaper pages were the only things that intermittently broke the silence. I noticed that I did not hear the lawyers arguing anymore. OK, I have been through the chart three times already. How many more times can I sort through this thing?
Then Madame Sigh caught my attention. She’s sitting less than ten feet away from me in the front row and she keeps sighing loudly every minute or so. I know lady, nobody really wants to be here. Try not to remind everybody about it. With the 15th sigh, I have now decided that she is getting kicked off of any potential jury. I’m not listening to that for the next two weeks. I start to make tally marks on my notebook with each whiff of her breath I catch. Something to do . . . hooray.
It has now been an hour and 10 minutes since I sat down in the courtroom. The jury has been sitting staring at me for just over 45 minutes. Madame Sigh is up to number 67. The sighs were starting to get more frequent. Was she in labor? No. No. Wait. Wait. She’s in DKA. Yeah. Or maybe a brainstem herniation? A “When Harry Met Sally” movie remake audition? I felt myself wanting to giggle, so I tried to stop that line of thought … which is like trying not to think of an albino elephant. Once the image is in your mind, it’s tough to just “forget” about it.
There was a small jury room next to the judge’s bench. One of the jurors asked Hitch where the bathroom was. He pointed her to the jury room then he sauntered into the back again. Now that everyone knew that the courtroom had a bathroom, suddenly everyone had to go. Within no time there was a line of at least 10 people waiting to go to the bathroom. That was a good thing. Now I can pass the time watching other people walk by me, and, as I scanned the room, I saw that everyone’s attention was no longer focused on me. There was now something else to look at. Thanks, Hitch.
A little while later, Hitch entered the room, adjusted his belt for a minute, cleared his throat and exclaimed loudly “I have good news and bad news for everyone.” The good news is that everyone can go back downstairs. You’re excused for the day.” He never did say what the bad news was. I kept waiting for him to look at me and say “The bad news for you, WhiteCoat, is that you have to sit here after lunch with 40 different angry people staring at you.” How many more times can I page through the chart?
The sheep all filed out of their stalls.
Madame Sigh, who, based on her fast respirations and rather unappealing breath, I had unofficially concluded was in the throes of DKA, waved her arms in the air and mumbled something about “missing out on a $100/hour job because of this.” I just smiled and nodded to several jurors as they filed out of the courtroom.
Well, it was back to just me and the plaintiffs sitting in the courtroom. I glanced over and they had hardly changed position. What WERE they staring at on that wall, anyway?
After everyone had left, a cadre of attorneys came in through a door on the opposite side of the courtroom from the judge’s chambers. How did they get there?
Vinny then told me the “bad” news that Hitch forgot to mention. The trial had been postponed.
Then he told me what all the arguing was about. It seems that even though the patient died more than 6 years ago, the plaintiff’s attorney had just found some new earth-shattering evidence against me and wanted to amend his complaint (i.e. change the bad things he said about me) on the day of trial. The judge nixxed that one. That was the “denied” statement I heard coming from the back earlier.
The Grinch also found a bunch of pictures of the patient taken on the day he died that he wanted to show to the jury. He wanted to argue that the patient’s appearance 9 hours later was the same as it was when I saw him. Of course, the patient looked horrible in the pictures. Didn’t make any sense to me because the plaintiff’s attorney was saying that my delay in diagnosis is what caused the patient to die, but he’s also arguing that there was no change in the patient’s condition for 9 hours, so the pictures should be admissible. I’m really not liking the Grinch very much right now. Judge didn’t rule on that request.
Then there were the experts. The only day one of the plaintiff’s experts could show up to testify was on the same day that Vinny’s son was supposed to have surgery. This expert apparently couldn’t get any other day free for a couple of months. He must be testifying against a lot of other physicians.
My attorneys wanted to proceed with trial and the plaintiffs wanted to delay it. The judge called the Chief Justice in the courthouse and they all went down to argue the issue in his chambers, hence the magic trick of leaving through one door and appearing through another door on the other side of the building. The Chief Justice agreed with the plaintiff.
So everyone donned their coats and left the courtroom like it was no big deal.
I took off two weeks of work for this damn trial and that’s it — “it’s been fun … we’ll do it again in a couple of months”?
This really sucks.
(read previous posts in this series here)
You are doing a great job of capturing the efficiency of the legal system, as well as its regard for the parties’ time and mental health.
It is appropriate to demand of the defense lawyer that no delay be granted. It is bad form to not show up for one’s trial. So, the lawyer can argue that a delay will cause additional disruption in the care of 100′s of patient, and should be granted. Judges do care about that.
The defense lawyer should be asking the doctor, but makes more money when a delay takes place. The doctor should be allowing it only if there is a clearly explained tactical advantage for the defense.
Are you writing this in real time or has this already happened months ago? Am I gonna have to wait months to find out what the heck happened? Jeez. That really sucks!
Read the other posts in the series toni. This happened in the past and has already been resolved. WhiteCoat has said that there will be a new post every couple of days or so and there should be around 25 parts or so.
Whoo hoo, I accurately guessed the “denied!” as relating to amending the complaint.
The pictures come in, so long as someone can authenticate them as “fairly and accurately” depicting what he looked like (and noting any differences). Of course, other witnesses are entitled to dispute that.
Expert and witness scheduling is a total nightmare. Generally, the person calling the witness gets to schedule, so long as they’re letting their case proceed in an orderly fashion, so I’m going to put blame on Vinny for not giving earlier notice of his son’s surgery unless (1) he did or (2) the surgery was scheduled suddenly.
Lie detector machines have some usefulness and validation. Yet, their results are excluded from testimony. The idea that a group of annoyed strangers can detect the truth by using their gut feelings or can settle disputes in advanced technical fields is a psychotic delusion of the lawyer. The lawyer has excluded any with knowledge, making matters worse.
In the Middle Ages, the jurors had good knowledge of the case. They had walked the disputed property line 10 years before. They knew the criminal since childhood. Together they contributed the wisdom of the crowd. The lawyer has perverted these advantages grasped 1000 year ago, and excludes those with knowledge and even those married to those with knowledge. There is no point to having a jury, if only ignoramuses are allowed by the biased lawyer on the bench.
The sole valid jury vote is the secret first vote. It should be the only one allowed. After that, the jury vote reflects the opinion of the biggest loud mouth. The rest of the jurors only want to go home, will go along with any decision that will end their ordeal. If there is a lawyer on the jury, he can reverse the majority vote in the direction of his biased opinion.
The jurors should be compensated at their standard salary rate, and there should be no one excused, not even the President of the United States. This is a version of dragooning. The theft of their services is a regulatory taking violating the Fifth Amendment, and I do not care what case law says. The case law was set by judges dependent on free jury services. Their conflict of interest makes all their appellate decisions unlawful and corrupt.
The defense should be permitted to tell the truth. But for the plaintiff complaint, their lives would not have been interrupted.
WC,
Brings back very painful memories. My recently concluded trial was also postponed twice.
My lawyer did not make me aware of the edicate of standing up as the potential jurers filed in. My jury selection was in a huge room with about 200 potential jurors and took over 2 days. I was in front like a stage for the longest 5 minutes of my life every time they had to file in.
Don’t you love the drafting of the jury nonsense with the sticky notes? It seemed no more advanced than the draft for my daughters city league basketball team.
Hey, have you seen this news article?
New details about Michael Jackson’s Death Emerge
I was wondering if you were going to blog about this…
Somebody needs to explain to me what a jury of your peers really means. I heard once it just meant demographics so if you’re a pink polka dot person who just happens to live in an area with green polka dot people, your jury will consist of the green polka dot people. I know that sounded silly but really how can a jury of non-medical laypeople judge a physician in a medical malpractice case?
I’m not a lawyer or a doctor, so I know nothing about nothing, but this process sounds like such bullshit. Each new entry makes my heart rate go up at the fooking pointlessness of it all. Healthcare is not a normal business. The tort rules that govern most interactions shouldn’t be the same.
It certainly is not bullshit. Every strange, inexplicable, oddball decision, you will notice, increases lawyer billing.
Um, pardon my limited knowledge, but doesn’t the law say something about a right to a speedy trial?
Oh and Supremacy Clause – although I agree with you completely in principle on the idea that jurors should receive full compensation for their time and no one should be exempted….just out of curiosity, how would you compensate a stay-at-home mother who technically earns no salary; also, what would you suggest she do with a breast-fed only infant who has never been away from Mom & (for whatever reason) has not yet been introduced to bottles?
Employment discrimination laws cover that scenario. What salary would be required to replace her services for her 8 hour workday of a juror? I think you could find someone to do child care, cook, shop, clean, for around $10 an hour, times 8 hours (time on jury duty for a day), so about $80 a day.
As to breast feeding, no employment laws cover that. Some employers allow it at work, and it is not disruptive. Others do not.
Some of the issues are here.
http://www.parentingatwork.org/facts.html
It is not settled in the workplace, so it is not settled in the court. If allowing babies at work replaces maternity leave, it is quite advantageous to the employer.
One’s peers are one’s fellow citizens in town. So, random assignments to cases would be the fairest. That would end the churning cases, and appeals on discriminatory juries. It would end voir dire, the questioning of juries. The latter has never been proven effective for the lawyers. They add hours and days to their billed time.
As to undue influence of a dominating person on the jury, that would end by allowing only one secret vote upon entering the jury room, without discussion of the case. Then everyone can go home. Under such circumstances, the legislature could set a high threshold of a super majority of the jury for guilty, e.g. 9 of 12.
DKA — Diabetic Keto-Acidosis, correct?
Otherwise known as that strange fruity smell from aisle six.
[...] All assemble for trial: more installments in White Coat’s saga of his malpractice case [Emergency Physicians Monthly, parts seven and eight] [...]
So frustrating!
Still .. laughing tho.
There are 2 legal cases going on that I am privy to..even somewhat close to and I can not believe..all the delays. One of them involves the murder I mentioned last year.
I know that one is like comparing apples to bowling balls with your case.
The person is allegedly accused of shooting his wife in the temple. (Feb 08)he was under house arrest until a judge recently lifted it and the man is free to go where he wants to. Any idea how uncomfortable that makes a lot of people who live near this person..who has a history of angry outbursts?
And recently some towns people were at a meeting involving another legal case…involving this man and someone brought the murder trial up. A representative of the Attorney General’s office said the murder case could take years before it goes to trial.
You have to be kidding me! The police had the house guarded for 3 days while they collected evidence before they pressed charges. I know innocent until proven guilty.
I am just FLOORED that something so serious could be put off for so long and in the mean time a murderer is roaming free. ??? If it wasn’t him..then it was someone else and all this time is being wasted.
Sorry… this post regarding delays..hit a nerve!
I do not understand our legal system!