Negligent Resuscitation Resulting in Pain and in Cost

https://www.abqjournal.com/1247179/woman-sues-hospital-for-resuscitating-her-ex-patient-alleges-her-dnr-directive-was-ignored-after-drug-allergy-caused-her-to-have-a-cardiac-arrest-2.html

Connick Decision: Insurmountable Obstacle to Prosecutor Liability

"Held: A district attorney’s office may not be held liable under §1983 for failure to train its prosecutors based on a single Brady violation. "

If tort liability is a substitute for violence, the obverse is true in formal logic. Immunity justifies violence.

Immunity is a form of unauthorized stealthy industrial policy because it grows the entire enterprise, and liability deters the entire enterprise, not just a defendant.

The sole justification for sovereign immunity in the common law is that the Sovereign speaks with the Voice of God. That is a psychotic delusion and not a valid reason to allow immunity of any government entity.

Because the sole tool of the court is punishment, it qualifies for strict liability. Professional standards of due care is sufficient, however.

Finally, the court will say it has no time for lawsuits. The welder's time is far more valuable than that of the coffee swilling, lazy, do nothing government workers on the Supreme Court.

Immunity may also be a factor in the failure of every self stated goal of every law subject. Accountability may prod the intelligent lawyer into being more competent and productive. The rule of law is an essential utility product. Its utter failure is a huge drag on the progress and development of the nation.

An amendment should be passed to end the immunity of all government agencies, including prosecutors, courts, and regulators. To deter.

"It's Not for the Money" Unethical?

"The attorney handling the case is Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch and now of Freedom Watch, who said money is not the issue.

"This case is filed as a matter of principle," he said. "We need more Bradlee Deans in the world and hateful left wing television commentators must be made to respect not only his mission but the law."
Torts has the aim of compensating the plaintiff for damages. Any other purpose should be considered an improper purpose. Such an utterance justifies a complaint to the ethics agency, a motion for dismissal with all costs assessed to the assets of the plaintiff attorney and plaintiff, and a civil suit for misuse of a civil procedure. An improper purpose is an element of most states' misuse of a civil procedure laws.

Revising Legal Standards for Defamation in Journalism

Libel laws should be changed. There should be tort liability of news organizations if they violate their own Code of Ethics. One of the most important is to provide two sides of the story. Such a new standard would imply, the profession is regulating itself, and not the government, perhaps in violation of the Freedom of the Press Clause.

Once any violation is proven, the liability should be automatic. The sole dispute in court should be about the value of the damages. The actual malice standard of the NY Times case should result in exemplary damages (triple actual damages). To deter.

This would be an elegant way to redefine defamation, to deter fake news, and to compensate the victims of journalism.

Fire This Judge

This family is just a very hostile family. The judge is indulging their hatred. They are to sue 80 parents who signed a petition opposing this child's denial of reality. This judge is using the power of the state to impose his sciko feelings on an entire community. This sicko judge should be removed by the employer or get driven from the state.

Improving Prosecutions

The Rules of Conduct should add a fiduciary duty to the list of prosecutor special duties. The prosecution and the plea should not be motivated by personal advantage.

Do not spend $2 million prosecuting Martha Stewart on a $40,000 insider trading beef and on lying to the FBI in an informal conversation in her home, in order to get your name in the papers. That prosecutor should have lost his law license.

End all prosecutorial tort immunities, or failing to pass a constitutional amendment, force all prosecutors to waive their immunity if they want to keep their jobs in the executive branch. Tort liability would allow the specialty to police itself through standard of professional due care analyses by the courts. Let them all carry liability insurance as everyone else does.

Prosecutors should also be liable for discretion errors resulting in damage to crime victims, again in accordance to professional standards.

The carelessness of prosecutors fully qualifies for strict liability. But, they are so bad, such a standard would end prosecutions and bankrupt government. They fail to prosecute 95% of serious crime. When they have a guy, 20% of the time they have the wrong guy. That is also true in $million budget, death penalty cases. Worse, they have forced the wrong guy to accept a plea deal. In the case of the $million budget death penalty case, they get the wrong guy to confess to the murder in 25% of exonerated cases. They fed him details of the crime only the murderer would know.

Prosecutors have to be the most failed group of specialists in the entire nation. Maybe, public defenders have a worst record. Those are totally useless.

Remedies for False Allegations of Rape

Washington Post report on Rolling Stone settlement with U of Virginia official after false allegation of rape, and false allegation of indifference by the university to the allegation of rape.

Martha Stewart spent 5 months in prison, 5 months on house arrest, and years on probation not for insider trading, but for lying about not receiving a phone call, to FBI agents, at her home, in an informal interview, not under oath.

All false allegations of rape should result in the same charge and sentencing. All false allegations should result in tort liability of the false accuser, of any newspaper reprinting the false allegations, and of any police or prosecutorial agency, falsely prosecuting such allegations.

Once the false accuser is convicted, the tort liability should be automatic. The sole question for any tribunal should be the value of any damage to the falsely accused.

Medical Malpractice Defense Points Not Usually Considered

I am not a lawyer, but I know where they live. Matters are 100 times worse than any one realizes with the lawyer profession.I would want to make the following defense points.  I would appreciate knowing any lawyer rebuttal.

1) Four Elements that must be proven in a tort case.

Duty
Breach
Injury
Injury Caused by Breach

2) Even lawyers forget the fifth. Unforeseen intervening cause. Any plaintiff conduct remotely related to the injury should be brought up, and a motion to dismiss should be made at every procedural step. Examples, smoking, non-adherence, family effects, outside stress.

3) In terms of breach due to a deviation from professional standards of due care, the courts will allow minority views in a subject that is not completely settled, and no medical subject is completely settled.

4) The tort is based on a theory of chain of causation. Great in the 13th Century, total lawyer quackery today. Lawyer quackery violates the Fifth Amendment procedural due process right to a fair trial of the defendant, even in a tort case.

A doctor sued BMW for a bad paint job and was awarded $4 million. The Supreme Court affirmed the Fifth Amendment  due process rights of defendants in torts.

The current view of catastrophes is that multiple factors cluster in a space and time, for example 12 of them in an airplane or car crash. The prevention of any one may prevent the entire catastrophe, often. The chain of causation is a myth. If followed enough, it ends at the Big Bang, and the court should try to collect from the entity that caused the Big Bang. The lawyer is ridiculous and stupid. They start with high IQ's and end up doing stuff from 1275 AD. I call that stupid, except they take in $trillion and damage the economy far more than that.

5) I urge defendants to personally attack the other side, and to share their own misery with the other side. The most powerful attacks are in the trial and in motions to the trial judge. Find a factual mistake anywhere, in the resume of the expert, in the out of court social media postings of all parties, in depositions. Adjectives and opinions are legally immune. I think this person is evil, stupid, greedy, etc. All are adjectives and immunized by the First Amendment. False facts are criminal and criminality should result in dismissal, and in sanctions, such as prison, all legal costs to the assets of the perjurer, exclusion of the testimony, disqualification. Disqualify the plaintiff lawyer, disqualify the experts, then even disqualify the judge.

No defense lawyer will ever do that. You may have to hire a personal lawyer to terrorize the defense lawyer. The latter makes no money until reaching trial. They are paid less than HMO doctors, and may actually lose money on overhead by insurance companies. Your personal lawyer should also threaten the insurance company for paying the defense lawyer too little, as form of insurance fraud, or insurance bad faith. Defendant thought he would  getting the Dream Team, from the slick brochure, got the dead time of losers.

6) If court tactics fail, try regulatory tactics. File complaints with all licensing boards, all Disciplinary Counsel. Even if dismissed, the other side will be spending time and worry in continual investigations. Make it so no amount of money is worth the plaintiff case. They may have to hire lawyers to deal with these investigations. File discrimination complaints, for example, the lawsuit is because the defendant is white, and male.

I find defense lawyers far more detestable than plaintiff lawyers. That is because they pretend to be on your side, but are working only for themselves, even if that means hurting your interests. They are the ones with duties to you. They are the ones with professionalism. They are the ones who betray both. Legal malpractice claims have totally insurmountable obstacles, and are a waste of time. So any understandings can only come before hiring or approval of a defense lawyer. Bring your personal lawyer with you, in your meeting with your defense lawyer, as if you were meeting the FBI. It is that bad.

The above apply to the innocent or controversial defendant. If the defendant is clearly at fault for a serious injury, a quick settlement is in the interest of the doctor, of the  patient and of the profession. A guilty defendant using the above tactics is abusing the system, and should be punished for doing so.The overwhelming fraction of medical malpractice defendants are found, not guilty. So most medical malpractice claims are invalid. This is true even in defendant judicial hellholes. In Philadelphia, a true judicial hellhole, 70% of the medical defendants are found, not guilty. The problem is that the cost of litigation has had an impact on health care. Almost all obstetrical wards have closed in Philadelphia, despite the statistic. As a result of lawyer perfidy, a woman is lucky to get a space in the hallway of the remaining services to deliver a baby.

Nursing Home Litigation Not Related to Quality

According to the article, litigation increased in the 1990's. That happened to coincide with the greater funding of nursing care. The best correlate of litigation is assets not quality. The tort system is a really a system of lawyer plunder.


"High-quality nursing homes get sued almost as often as low-quality nursing homes, a new study shows. Researchers say the finding illustrates that litigation, or the threat of litigation, doesn't lead to improvements in patient care. Nor does it appear that better nursing homes are rewarded for superior care in terms of fewer lawsuits."

Read More .

Assessment of Costs by Clerk of Court Despite Wealth Disparity

The Third Circuit covers Pennsylvania. Given the fact that 80% of malpractice claims are weak, this decision should result in more requests for costs. In this case, two claims were not filed on time, and summary judgments for the hospital were granted.

The decision is here.

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d)(1):

(d) Costs; Attorney’s Fees.

(1) Costs Other than Attorneys’ Fees.

Unless a federal statute, these rules, or a court order provides otherwise, costs — other than attorney's fees — should be allowed to the prevailing party. But costs against the United States, its officers, and its agencies may be imposed only to the extent allowed by law. The clerk may tax costs on 14 days' notice. On motion served within the next 7 days, the court may review the clerk's action.

Current State of Tarasoff Decision

Here is a database of state rules on the duty to warn.

This decision mandated the reporting of a person-specific threat by a mental patient to the target. It was more lawyer intimidation and take over of clinical care. I doubt a single life has been saved by this decision. The alternative is to rely on clinical judgment. There are 2000 people murdered by paranoid schizophrenics each year. The doctor should have the discretion to call the target, the police, the family of the patient, or to file commitment papers to maintain safety. All these remedies that could prevent harm have been closed off by the lawyer on the bench. The Tarasoff was irrational, then and now. It did generate multiple lawsuits and the plunder of clinical care, and that was its sole real purpose. From Daniel W. Shuman, JD. This article contains statutory reporting requirements by state.

"The case in brief

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit (Tarasoff v Regents of the University of California, 551 P2d 334 [Cal 1976]), the victim’s parents, alleged that a patient (Poddar) communicated his intention to kill their daughter to his therapist, but that the therapist neither warned her nor took other appropriate actions and sought damages for the resulting harm. The de-fendants moved to dismiss.

There are no new facts to add to the recitations found in hundreds of books and articles on Tarasoff, and nobody wants to hear them again. The trial transcript might have provided some new perspective, but there was no trial or evidentiary hearing. According to the Supreme Court of California, there had been a “Complaint” containing the claimants’ version of events. But instead of an “Answer,” which might have admitted or denied the factual allegations of the complaint, the defendants filed a “Motion to Dismiss,” which, according to convention, accepted the plaintiffs’ factual allegations for purposes of the motion only.

The court granted the motion to dismiss, and the plaintiffs took this appeal. No trial. No evidentiary hearings. And no evidence. The report of Poddar’s appeal of his second-degree murder conviction centers on his mental state and consequential culpability (People v Poddar, 103 Cal Rptr 84 [Cal Ct App 1972]). Although there are inherent limits in every case on accurately reconstructing the past, this case was resolved before an attempt to do so. The facts, therefore, that have been passed on from one article to the next may be right or may be urban legend. We do not know.

The legal ramifications

Why does it matter what the sources of the reported facts were anyway? Why should we care whether some came from a journalist, some from a paralegal who worked for the defendants, and some from the authors of the Tarasoff articles’ independent investigation?

First, we have an imperfect but known reliability filter called the “Rules of Evidence” to screen proof of facts in trial. We cannot endorse extra-judicial fact-finding without knowledge of the process and its reliability. Second, cognizant of the limitations of this fact-finding process, the judicial system is explicit about the standard of persuasion, which expresses the level of confidence required on an issue—probable cause, preponderance of the evidence, clear and convincing or beyond a reasonable doubt. Third, the legitimacy of the fact finder in our judicial system—jury or judge—is grounded in constitutional law and public scrutiny.

By what process were these “facts” determined? To what degree of certainty? By what authority? What are the implications for the scholarship perched on this precarious foundation? Before going any further, this is a conversation in which those authors who discovered or applied those facts should be included.

The opinion of the California high court recites the procedural history of the case.10 A civil claim for damages was brought in a California court in Alameda County, against a California university health center psychologist, among others. It alleged that in 1969, a student-patient of the psychologist murdered another student. In response, the defendants filed a motion to dismiss."