EDITORIAL: She Was There: Grand Jury Refusal to Indict Reflects Widespread View of Katrina Doctor’s Innocence
By Houston Chronicle
Jul. 28–Inside a cool New Orleans courthouse, nine grand jurors relived the week all hell broke loose — and refused to brand Anna Pou a killer.
Their conclusion, delivered after a needless year-long delay, was a beam of fairness in a national disaster marked by injustice.
By rights, Pou, a physician, should have been able to spend the past year treating patients and recovering from Hurricane Katrina.
Refusing to flee, Pou and her colleagues stayed at Memorial Medical Center to treat and evacuate patients.
The hospital’s evacuation plan imploded. When wrecked levees flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, Memorial — meant to be a sanctuary — became a prison. Electricity failed, temperature rocketed to 110 degrees, and the first floor filled with water.
Pou and her colleagues worked round the clock, improvising without the standard medications, tools or lab work.
Before help came, 30 of the hospital’s sweltering, parched patients died. Others had to be pulled through a large hole and carried on human backs to the roof.
That professional devotion should have been recognized. But last year Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti arrested Pou, accusing her and two nurses of killing four patients with pain medication.
His case festered with improprieties. Unbelievably, he arrested Pou before the alleged victims were autopsied (the coroner deemed the cause of death undetermined).
Foti deemed the drugs in the patients’ bodies a lethal “cocktail” — although doctors who specialize in palliative care agree the drugs are routine pain-management tools. Now Foti is trying to flog the case back to life by unsealing court documents, even though grand jurors have deemed his accusation “not a true bill.”
There is nothing wrong with scrutinizing the choices made in Katrina’s chaos. According to National Public Radio, some witnesses claimed staffers discussed lethal injection for patients too sick to move. But there is no evidence these injections occurred.
Louisiana’s Board of Medical Practice, trained to review complex medical choices, should have been the first to review Foti’s claims.
In any case, a grand jury of ordinary citizens found those claims unsupported. The conclusion was a rebuke to a self-serving politician; voters may speak even more loudly.
The jury’s decision also echoed the intuitive conclusion of hundreds of Louisianans who defended Pou in newspapers, Web postings and protests. For doctors and nondoctors both, there was a clue from the start that Pou and her colleagues spent those five days of the storm working to do good.
A sign at a recent rally put their case simply: “They were there.”
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