An old saying in criminal defense circles is that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if the prosecutor is inclined to do so.
Fortunately, that was not the case in regard to former Houston area resident, Dr. Anna Pou (previous posts here). Dr. Pou served on the faculty of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston from 1997-2004, where she was the Director of the Division of Head and Neck Surgery from 1999 to 2004. Kevin, M.D. has been doing a good job of tracking developments and comments regarding the case against Dr. Pou, and here is the link to the website that has been established to help raise funds for Dr. Pou’s defense.
Following on this recent post on developments in Dr. Pou’s case, a New Orleans Parish grand jury today declined to indict Dr. Pou for second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of several elderly patients in the horrifying aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The decision ends a two-year long criminal investigation into Dr. Pou’s heroic treatment of patients at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, which was turned into a sweltering, powerless hellhole on Aug. 29, 2005 when the levees failed after the hurricane. Inasmuch as the hospital was not evacuated until several days after the storm, 24 out of 55 elderly and infirm patients died.
The case against this distinguished academic had all the earmarks of a political lynch mob from the beginning. It became quickly apparent that Dr. Pou’s arrest was the result of the highly questionable accusations of three employees of LifeCare Hospitals, the company that owned the hospital and whose top administrator and medical director didn’t even show up at the hospital during those chaotic days after Katrina. Inasmuch as the accusing LifeCare employees made no effort to evacuate the elderly and sick patients before or after the hurricane, it quickly became clear to any reasonably objective observor that they were attempting to divert attention (and perhaps prosecution) from their own appalling inaction.
But the facts didn’t matter to an elderly Louisiana attorney general named Charles Foti, who had campaigned on a plank of “cracking down on abuse of the elderly.” Foti engineered the arrest of Dr. Pou and two of her nurses while publicly referring to them as murderers, a charge that he repeated in an episode of 60 Minutes several months later. Although Dr. Pou’s lawyer had told Foti that she would surrender to authorities if an arrest warrant were issued for her, Foti had his investigators arrest Dr. Pou and haul her into Orleans Parish Prison on the evening of July 17, 2006, where she was booked on four counts of second-degree murder. Thankfully, the decision on whether to prosecute Dr. Pou was not Foti’s, but that of New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan and the local grand jury, which was undoubtedly persuaded by the New Orleans coronor’s report that earlier this year concluded that no compelling evidence of homocide existed. But that did not stop Jordan from recently granting immunity to the two nurses who were charged with Dr. Pou in an effort to induce them to testify against Dr. Pou before the grand jury. Sheesh!
So, when does the investigation of the public officials begin who were responsible for attempting to organize this lynch mob?