Lest anyone think I'm a one-sided kind of guy, say with regard to my comments regarding law enforcement, I offer today's tale of How Not To Do Your Jobs:
(PITTSBURGH) Eugene Wright of Meadville says police and medical workers got the wrong man when they transported him to the local hospital this summer and injected him with anti-psychotic drugs against his will, thinking he was someone else.RTWT.
"The experience that I went through, this should never happen to anybody. It's very simple to check ID," said Mr. Wright, 63. "These people need to be held responsible."
Mr. Wright and his wife, Carolyn Wright, made their allegations in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday against the police in Meadville, the Meadville Medical Center and a local crisis center, Stairways Behavioral Health.
Mr. Wright had the misfortune to have the same name as another Eugene Wright, a psychiatric patient who police said had issued threats at his doctor's office, his suit says.
Long story short: they did, in fact, have the wrong guy.
"But they were acting in good faith!"
Yeah, right up until that failure to look in his wallet, or call his employer or the ortho doc to confirm they had the right guy- or not. Times everyone from A to Z. No exercise of due dilligence equals gross negligence and depraved indifference to the consequences. And deserves a prison sentence.
So Innocent Bystander gets hauled away to the nuthouse.
And now, I'm the Pittsburgh D.A., by the power of the Internet.
What happens?
Officers Shithead and Fuckstick are suspended without pay for battery, kidnapping, false arrest, false imprisonment, criminal conspiracy to do all of the above, and making terroristic threats. They deserve to be fired for cause, and referred for criminal prosecution.
The representative for Stairways who accompanied them gets charged with making a false report, criminal negligence, and accessory to all the charges against the Meadville PD.
Any nurse(s) who gave the medications has their license suspended, and is charged with criminal medical battery on a patient and gross professional negligence, along with false arrest and false imprisonment. Their license(s) gets revoked by their state board, and they get referred to criminal prosecution.
Ditto for the ordering MD at the hospital.
All of the above: the PD, the crisis center, the hospital, the nurse(s), the doctor, get civilly sued for the maximum penalty that a jury will accept. The chief of police, and the CEOs of both health facilities are also named as co-defendants civilly and criminally for gross incompetence and criminal negligence leading to battery, medical battery, kidnapping, false arrest, and false imprisonment.
Oh, and sue the orthopedic doctor and his staff for failing to make a complete report. They deserve some love in this too.
The cardinal rule I've observed in a couple of decades in the E.D. is that the more you're arguing with someone, the exponentially greater the likelihood that they're right and you're not. Break the chain early, and double check, especially when it's as easy at it would have been here to sort it out with certainty.
It was the responsibility of the nurse treating that patient to make sure he/she had the right patient - not just the one the doctor pointed at, but that he was indeed the mental health case in question. When nothing more than an ID check and one phone call would have raised the question and undone the entire chain of errors here, there's no excuse, for anyone involved. Some criminal arrests and indictments would drive that home satisfactorily.
I don't have the medical record info here, but if the patient was not in any way an imminent danger to himself or others in the hospital, there was no reason whatsoever to administer ANY medications to him under any circumstances. If the record shows that he did nothing but raise the obviously valid legal and medical point that they had the wrong guy, and was not physically combative, they should be fired and sued just for that act. That's medial battery all by itself, even if he was the correct whackjob in question.
There should be five to ten people facing actual state and federal prison for this incident, and the plaintiff deserves a mid eight-figure payout to drive the point well home.
And then every staff member of the PD, crisis center, and hospital, down to admitting clerks, has to undergo mandatory training by the state, at their employers' expense, on properly validating the ID of a mental health patient in crisis adequately and properly.
When you have someone frothing and barking on scene, that problem is solved. But when you send your minions to round up people in the community, and end up kidnapping the innocent off the streets and hooking them up as psych cases, it needs to leave a mark, in both the criminal and civil divisions of the superior court, and at the federal level. (Posit this guy as someone with a valid CCW and carrying when the cops roll up, and let your mind wander how it turns out. One or more people dead, because a clerk had his/her head up their own ass. That's why everyone who screwed this pooch should be fired and criminally prosecuted, and not just sued into poverty.)
This is utterly unconscionable and inexcusable behavior at every level, and several people need a long, quiet time in a small gray cell - let alone some frequent group sex sessions in pound-you-in-the-ass-prison - to contemplate the responsibilities of their former jobs, and the rights of the people they're supposed to be serving.
After that, they can get jobs greeting people at f**king WalMart for all I care.
They're shitbags as human beings, and if it were my relative or yours involved, the full measure of justice in this kind of case would require baseball bats and some emergency dental and orthopedic surgery. Blowtorches and pliers might possibly be involved.
20 comments:
It's posts like this that keep me coming back here every day.
Posts like this are why I sweat bullets every shift at work, because I'm partially at the mercy of someone else doing the same thing, and dropping it in my lap.
It only takes once...
Wouldn't it be easier to say I'm sorry, share cookies and juice together, hug, then hold hands in a circle and sing kumbaya ?
With all respect, break their rice bowl, but no criminal charges. If the police were stupid, they will lose their "profession", they will never be able to get a decent job anywhere as a result of their actions. They did not follow procedure? Did not evince common sense" Assuming the report is accurate in all details, they are toast. However...those of us who were not there are hearing only one side of the altercation...the victims. If the incident was as reported, the cops will be terminated, never to work in Law Enforcement again, and the Victim will have won the lottery.
There are always at least two sides to a story...but if malicious intent be the case, a cellie named Butch McDick is in their future.
Anon at 8:43,
Speaking as a former "police" for plenty of decades, your position of "If the police were stupid, they will lose their "profession", they will never be able to get a decent job anywhere as a result of their actions." could get you a god start in stand-up comedy.
All of public safety is just like any other "profession". There is no Colgate invisible shield that protects against stupid from infiltrating the ranks of everywhere, including the left hand seat on your next commercial airline flight. Working in LE resembles the boy in "Sixth Sense"...I see stupid people...they are everywhere...including right behind you in the stack.
Badges don't grant extra rights.
If you committed kidnapping, battery, false imprisonment, etc., then expecting someone whose job it is to enforce the law to live up to a higher standard (not a lower one) isn't unreasonable.
I'm pretty sure no court would let stand an "unless government does it" standard of law, because the immovable standard since the founding of the republic, and centuries before, is equality before the law.
If this was just a monetary crime, I could see leaving it at firing them. But this was kidnapping and battery - crimes against a person - and only criminal prosecution in such a case will suffice. A wrist slap won't cut it.
And the surest way to ensure nobody ever works in those jobs again is to hang the deserved felony convictions around their necks.
QED
Off-topic for your article above but are you tracking:
this? Add'l info here.
While I agree with you, I ain't holding my breath.
Remember Timothy Young and David Eckert?
For those who don't remember, a brief synopsis: David Eckert got pulled over for a "rolling stop," the cop claimed that he was "clenching his buttocks" and further claimed that [an out-of-certification] police dog alerted, thus somehow justifying a search for rectally-concealed drugs. Cop had Eckert dragged to a local hospital for a rectal exam. Docs at that ER refused on ethical grounds despite a warrant, so Eckert was then dragged to ANOTHER hospital where Drs Okay Odacha (sic) and Robert Wilcox performed 2 digital rectal exams, 2 xrays, 3 enemas and a colonoscopy, despite the fact that the warrant was NOT valid in their hospital's county.
Now I have no idea whether Young and Eckert (these are two separate incidents) are upstanding citizens or dirtbags, but that's irrelevant. The people at the first ER are to be commended, the second should be stripped of their medical licenses at the least, but it appears that they aren't even taking a financial hit.
Oh, and for those of you (few I hope) who believe all that noble MD ("My patient comes first!") stuff you see on TV? The medical profession is full of ass-kissing shitheads whose only ethics are expediency. Not to mention laziness and greed.
"Speaking as a former "police" for plenty of decades, your position of "If the police were stupid, they will lose their "profession", they will never be able to get a decent job anywhere as a result of their actions." could get you a god start in stand-up comedy."
So you are a former "police"? Me also...OPD, Oakland Ca. Where is the intent to commit the crime? You know, a basic element of kidnapping.
Stand-up comedy? Getting bounced from such a job is no longer deniable with basic computer searches a fact of employment...being fired from a Department has a nasty ring to it.
Anonymous,
"Where is the intent to commit the crime?"
Since when is that relevant? As far as I know, you don't even have to know something is a crime, much less intend to do it to get arrested and convicted- except for Hillary Clinton & Co.
Laws are written by and for those in power and cops are their whores.
"Intent" would start with a reckless disregard for reality, and gross negligence in not ascertaining the identity of the person they were looking for, and then making sure they had that person.
Unless you'd like to argue that they carried out the kidnapping under hypnosis, they deliberately intended to apprehend and carry away the innocent victim.
As I noted, they stopped acting in good faith the minute the failed to use any basic diligence in the apprehension. That's not only blisteringly stupid, it's a criminal act. Not a mulligan.
I let it slide, but let's recall that these two assclowns not only kidnapped an innocent person, they also left a potentially dangerous psychopath to run loose because of their gob-smackingly jackassical refusal to use common sense in verifying who they were apprehending.
Kidnapping requires only the deliberate non-consensual moving of one person from one place to another.
When you have the wrong person, and drag them off to a hospital against their will, you've kidnapped them - un der color of authority. That's two federal felonies for the price of one. There were two officers, plus an agent of the crisis center. That's conspiracy. We're up to three federal crimes.
The problem isn't that they didn't break any laws, it's that Team Douchebadge breaks the law so frequently and so thoughtlessly every damned day that far too many of you regard black-letter statutes as more like the Pirates Code: Just rough suggestions, to be followed or ignored at your own whims.
And I'd buy your "basic computer search" assertion, except for the 500 citable instances where somebody canned in one jurisdiction gets hired in another.
but a nice felony jacket tends to preclude that far more reliably than Mayberry's half-assed background check.
But the proof of the pudding is this: how far would the D.A. laugh his dentures out of his mouth if Joe Blow claimed he didn't "intend" to kidnap someone when he only handcuffed them and threw them into his car, and then drove them across town?
If Offrs. Abbott and Costello had made the barest minimal effort to do what they do 500 times a day - look at the guys effing ID like he requested of them multiple times, and double-check who they were after - even with beat cop IQs they'd have figured out in about 4 seconds they'd fucked up, apologized, driven off to get the right psycho, and this never would've happened. Ditto for everyone else in this daisy-chain of shitheadedness. Everyone, top to bottom, was too smart to make sure.
That's reckless disregard for everything, including basic common sense.
One can only wonder what half-assed "description" the Dipwad PD considers adequate to make an apprehension, but clearly, they didn't bother with anything but a name.
In my area, there are literally 50 guys with the same name as mine. Going by first and last name alone (which everyone here did until they'd each and all already committed multiple criminal offenses) is utterly ridiculous.
Book 'em all, fry them, and then skin the carcass in civil court.
Both because they're all guilty as hell, and pour encorager les autres.
If using their heads for something besides a hat rack is too hard, they should be delivering pizzas. After they do hard time.
@ Mike C.:
I covered Mr. Eckert's tribulations back in the day:
http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2013/11/ass-raping-bill-of-rights-just-another.html
http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2014/01/justice.html
"Kidnapping requires only the deliberate non-consensual moving of one person from one place to another"
Correct. And police do this thousands of times a day, every day, everywhere. They do so under color of authority. They are also allowed the state's prerogative of violence...under color of authority, and this also occurs hundreds of times a day, every day, and everywhere...the law provides for these exceptions.
Aesop, with all respect, I was on the OPD in the late 60's. The police operate differently now, and I do not know why...what they are taught, how they are trained. I am just as offended at the various outrages we see and hear of as are you.
If you criminalize stupidity, the law enforcement system will not, cannot function...humans are flawed, and most cops are human.
Well, you might say, lets just criminalize the incredibly stupid...but that would require benchmarks that could be quantified and defined into law.
Force used under color of authority is usually a crime if it can be proved that the personnel used excessive force, or did so for reasons other than that which the enforcement of the law recognizes...and there lies intent.
I am not indorsing the actions of the police in the incident in question.
The pigs ALWAYS get away with whatever they do and the other participants will skate because they were just following orders (where have we heard that one before?) from the pigs, who are the Divinely Ordained minions of Leviathan.
Correct. And police do this thousands of times a day, every day, everywhere. They do so under color of authority. They are also allowed the state's prerogative of violence...under color of authority, and this also occurs hundreds of times a day, every day, and everywhere...the law provides for these exceptions.
The law provides for them only when you follow procedure and basic common sense.
I have to hope, as a basic tenet of common sense everywhere but the Keystone Kops, that confirming that you have the right subject might be one wee tenet of policy, procedure, and common fucking sense that even a patrolman can grasp and master in every department in the land.
(If it isn't, fire them all, and abolish the jobs wholesale, as we're better off with vendetta, feud, and mob justice.)
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, man, The Oxbow Incident came out in 1943. These assclowns were no brighter than set-piece villains in a movie from nearly 75 years ago.
This is not "criminalizing stupidity". Stupidity was when they ignored procedure.
Driving away, and doubling and then tripling down on deliberate and conscious stupidity is where you run aground from bare incompetence, and move to intentional criminal conduct.
When you have time to make terroristic threats against the victim at the hospital, and time to drive across town to the hospital, but no time to look at a driver's license, or make a confirming phone call to dispatch, the reporting party, or anyone else, you can no longer argue there was no intent to deprive the victim of his rights under color of authority. This wasn't just intent, it was gleefully executed criminality, "because we're special ones".
At that point, all force used is excessive, and their entire enterprise was in furtherance of the crimes committed.
If you're pleading that if forced to use common f**king sense, the police would find it impossible to falsely arrest and imprison and then kidnap innocent persons, subject them to medical battery, psychological and physical torture, and then walk away like they'd done nothing wrong, my response is
Boo fucking hoo.
That's entirely the point of going after them.
They can plead their individual case at sentencing, and maybe mandatory minimums mean they can breathe free air in 5 years, with good behavior.
They kidnapped and threatened an innocent man, and subjected him to torture, while leaving the real psycho walking the streets, and did so with depraved indifference to the cost to the individual victimized, to the society they were employed by, and the state and local laws they were sworn to serve.
I'm spitballing here, but that seems to be about as big a fuck-up as law enforcement can possibly make short of actually killing a man.
They are the guys who beat up Private Santiago at the end of A Few Good Men, and the "just following orders" defense ran out of gas in 1945. Maybe you read about it.
As I noted, the chief of the department should be a criminal co-defendant at their trial. The buck doesn't stop at the clerk's desk, it stops at the guys who blew this in person, and performed the criminal acts on the victim. Period. Full stop.
And ditto on the doctor and nurse(s) directly responsible for doing the same thing, and continuing the crimes.
"Ready, fire, aim" is not policy anywhere, and there's no excuse for getting this so wrong, so completely, at every step of the process.
This was a "just" an everyday fuckup when they went to the wrong house.
When they drove away with the wrong guy, without doing the most cursory check to ensure they had the right guy, it graduated to felony stupid.
It needs to leave a mark.
If you can't see that, you're the problem.
I think someone should take a look at the racial angle. Just to see if that gross indifference might have had some bias basis. Depending on which side here was paler, Mr. Wright or all the "professionals", this could either get buried or become a front page story around the world. Yeah, I'm stirring the pot ... but I've seen who works at hospitals these days, and there appears to be a fair amount of color bias in the caregiving quality.
"It needs to leave a mark.
If you can't see that, you're the problem."
Aesop,
I have no argument with what you are saying, the question is how and to what degree the punishment.
Any follow-up on the story? I would like to hear the "justification" offered for the screw-up.
Nothing AFAIK.
Given it's now a federal case (literally), vs. Podunk PD et al, everyone's lawyered up, and no one's going to talk until after the judgments roll in.
I recently had an epidural injection in my back, which is mildly invasive. The Dr. and staff made sure of my ID at least 3 times (have known me for at least 4-5 years) before sticking the needle in. The pigs weren't the only incompetents in this little f*ckup. The medical staff who participated should be fired and sued too. _revjen45
Exactly as noted in the OP, and some half-dozen times since then in comments and other posts, which the entire point of the subject: I have zero tolerance for any monumental cock-up like this, anywhere from A to Z, when basic common sense should have thwarted it 57 different ways.
There should be a party bus taking all those people to prison over this, not just the original two badged assclowns.
This level of disasterpiece theatre is beyond excuse, and demands criminal penalties for all concerned.
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