Occasionally an article will bring an ear-to-ear grin of pure pleasure to my face. Recently Whitecoat published such an article on his blog . . . one that gave me an acutely delicious attack of pure schadenfreude.
Charles Cullen obviously didn’t kill every patient that he cared for during his 16 year career. But some law firms sued the hospitals that Cullen worked at solely because Cullen cared for patients who later died. Their lawsuits alleged that Cullen killed patients even though there was a "complete lack of evidence" to support those claims. The cases were dismissed by the trial judge and the dismissals were affirmed on appeal. During depositions in the cases, family members admitted that they had no evidence linking Cullen to the death of the patients, only a "hunch" that the nurse "might" have been responsible.
Now one of the hospitals is suing the law firms for filing these frivolous cases.
St. Luke’s Hospital in Lehigh Valley, PA is suing Cohen & Feeley in Bethlehem, PA and John R Vivian of Easton, PA for proceeding with cases that the attorneys knew were "baseless and lacking in evidence". In addition, St. Luke’s sued the medical expert who certified the cases, Dr. John J. Shane, alleging that he used a "boilerplate" certificate of merit to allow the cases to proceed and did not even review the medical records of the victims before certifying the cases. Dr. Shane has been in trouble with the law before. In 2008, he was indicted by the Department of Justice for conspiracy and wire fraud (.pdf file) when he and two attorneys allegedly forged the will of a deceased person in an attempt to become beneficiaries of a multimillion dollar estate. Sounds like St. Luke’s Hospital needs to add a cause of action for "negligent hiring" to its lawsuit against the law firms.
There's more at the link.
Ambulance-chasing sharks, being pursued by other sharks working for the ambulances! Now that's a turn-up for the books!
Peter
Sometimes the books balance, and it makes us all happy.
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