Macabre

As I slouch along as a lawyer, it seems the only interesting matters I handle are the ones I do pro bono for friends.

Yesterday I represented a dear old friend at a deposition in a case that was out of a movie.

My friend is a professor, and used to volunteer as a member of the bioethics committee at a local hospital. The committee would typically hear "cases" presented by doctors and patients or patients' families involving end of life decisions.

This one involved a toddler who had a terminal, awful condition that left him in a vegatative state. The doctor and his parents agreed that the only reasonable course was to let the baby die, without further stringing along his corpse-like existence by artificial means.

The committee agreed, and the orders were written to allow the natural death. The mother got into bed with the baby, to hold him and let him pass.

Not so fast! A nurse on the unit, a strict Catholic, decompensated. She started raving that she was going to the press to expose how the hospital kills babies, how this was terrible, etc...

So, of course the hospital took the nurse off the case, explained that a wrenching decision had been made, and that although she was allowed her feelings, she was not to interfere with a parents' decision and doctor's order that was approved by an ethics committee. NOT!

The hospital caved in, and told the parents that they had reconsidered, and decided to keep the toddler going along for awhile!

And, for good measure, the hospital or one of its staff called Child Protection officials to report the parents for abuse --just in case they decided to go ahead with letting the toddler die! As Dave Barry always writes, I'm not making this up.

Well, the parents essentially fled the hospital with their baby, checked into a hotel room with him, and let him die. They then hired a fine young lawyer (I'm getting so old I remember his father well) and sued the doctor who reversed his order, and is about to sue the hospital.

My friend isn't going to be sued, but he's a star witness in the case --he confirmed that the commitee was asked to consider this worst of all situations, and agreed with the course of action.

The lawyer for the doctor is an old timer --good med mal defense lawyer, although he defended another doctor friend of mine several years ago, which led to a multimillion dollar judgment against him. (I got that one settled after suing the insurance company that left my friend hung out to dry).

My guess is that the hospital, at some point, will realize that although they have a lot of legal defenses to the claim, damn well better settle. Their handling of this matter was at best clownish, and at worst terribly cruel.

A close friend , also a top defense lawyer, called me to ask how the depo went. I asked him how the hell he even knew about the case. It turns out he was hired by one of the doctors who cared for the child, but one who won't be sued, either. The difference is that my buddy's getting paid for babysitting HIS deponent, while I worked for, I must say, a rather good Cuban chicken (pollo) lunch.

Once again, another example of how Miami is such a small town of a big city. At least in legal circles, there's never more than one degree of separation.

Watching organizations scramble to ass cover when bad things happen has been one of my career's guilty pleasures. This case takes the cake.