Posted on
November 5, 2013 in
What hellish dystopia is this? Without Eckert’s consent:
1. Eckert’s abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.
2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
4. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
5. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
6. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.
8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert’s anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.
(KOB 4.)
It’s Emmette Flynn all over again. Robert Wilcox, M.D and Okay Odocha, M.D. ought to be reviled in the same breath as Michael LaPaglia. The ethical rule is clear: you don’t perform medical procedures on a competent patient who refuses consent. There is no Befehl ist Befehl exception.
And it’s not as if Wilcox and Odocha had to comply:
The lawsuit claims that Deming Police tried taking Eckert to an emergency room in Deming, but a doctor there refused to perform the anal cavity search citing it was “unethical.”
But physicians at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City agreed to perform the procedure and a few hours later, Eckert was admitted.
What consequences did the doctor at the Deming emergency room suffer for telling the pigs to fuck off? None. What consequences would there have been had Wilcox and Odocha just said “no”? None.
The cops might skate, even though they were told that the search was unethical—they had a warrant, although their manner of executing it (time and place) appears not to have been strictly legal—and the doctors might not be disciplined by their fellow doctors, as Emmette Flynn was not disciplined by his, but to me this sounds like an eight-figure lawsuit against the doctors.
It probably wouldn’t be, if Wilcox and Odocha had assaulted Eckert in Texas. In Texas we have that conservative darling, tort reform, which limits a plaintiff’s recovery in a health care liability suit to $250,000. If Wilcox, Odocha, and Gila Regional Medical Center ((Or their insurers—I’m hoping there’s an exclusion that will bankrupt the doctors.)) split that three ways, that’s less than $85k apiece…not chicken feed, but nowhere near an amount that would indelibly get the attention of every doctor in America who might otherwise consider violating medical ethics at government request.
Thanks for that, “conservatives.”
“Not STRICTLY legal”.
That’s the same as “not legal”, right?
The Crown’s laws become considerably more flexible when agents of the Crown bend them.
All together now: They acted in good faith, and all procedures were followed.
State tort reform would not cap damages in a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 suit.
It’s very unlikely that the doctors face any liability under §1983.
It is not unlikely at all. The doctors were acting “under color of state law”. At least one of their procedures occurred after the warrant expired, so they won’t even have that to hide behind. And the testimony of the doctor who didn’t execute the searches won’t be helpful to the Frankensteins who did.
Sue the Exalted Ones? Quite cheeky for a Mere Mundane.
Yeah, but think about it: what more could they possibly do to him?
What more? Well, Gila Regional Medical Center could (and did) bill him thousands of dollars for the medical services provided him.
Ah! Mr. Simpson check the link (KOB, above)…there’s a Scribd link to the suit. It’s a 42 USC 1983 suit against every bastard near this ghastly horror.
Mark–Shree is 99% sure there’s no indemnification for “chust followink ordahs”
So good…nail the pigs under 1983,bankrupt the quacks outside their insurance.
I think Michael Simpson’s point was that my tort reform point is not a great one, since the doctors might be sued under Section 1983 for depriving Mr. Eckert of his civil rights under color of law.
Since his is a good point, I chose to ignore it. La la la I can’t hear you la la la.
Oh I see. Galling for you, but I enjoyed your anti-tort-reform rant still.
Doesn’t a 1983 suit puncture the “qualified immunity” the pigs hide behind? I’d love to see more of them held personally responsible for their acts.
While we’re at it–where does that doctrine come from, and how can it possibly be justified? It’s the same idiocy as corporate personhood…guaranteeing sociopathic behavior.
Or at least, guaranteeing sociopaths will seek positions where they can freely act like sociopaths.
“Qualified immunity balances two important interests—the need to hold public officials accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly and the need to shield officials from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably.” Pearson v. Callahan.
If a reasonable person in a public official’s position wouldn’t know that his or her actions violated clearly established law, what reason is there for allowing suit against the official in an individual capacity?
@JTM re: qualified immunity
JTM I’m sorry I’m suffering the effects of some respiratory virus…so my mind’s beneath its usual level of dull.
Can you please explain your explanation? I can’t parse it.
My original point is simply that *any* form of qualified immunity–anything more than what any ordinary citizen would have, which is *none*–is unjustifiable. I can’t see how it fits with “equality under the law” or any of the other core Magna Carta/Enlightenment/Bill of Rights memes we’ve discarded but still pay occasional lip service to.
And it begs abuse; exactly what we’re getting.
There’s a reason concealed license holders are less criminal on average than cops; (partially) because we’re held legally liable for our actions.
Where did the concept of “peace officer” go? They were nothing more than citizens who happened to be paid to do what any ordinary citizen could do; stop crime, arrest, etc. They had no extra rights; “had”, past tense. We’ve created, as all growing tyrannies do, an enforcement class. Will Grigg calls them “Exalted Ones” and various other erudite pejoratives.
It’s disgusting. And it’s come home to roost.
This case is only a little more egregious than the Texas State Troopers who manually raped two women by the side of the road, both orifices, both women, with one set of gloves. And that wasn’t an isolated case; it’s happened twice more just in the articles I’ve seen.
If the removal of qualified immunity has a chilling effect on a public official’s performance … good. They ought to err on the chilly side.
Thanks for that, “conservatives”
And thank you, “liberals” for stuffing this country full of savages with names like Dr. Okay Odocha and officers Orosco, Chavez, and Hernandez.
Many of you will come to suffer your own hellish moment of “but I’m not racist!” clarity.
I notice that you ignore the savages with names like Flynn, LaPaglia, and Wilcox.
And, it being New Mexico, there’s a good chance that “Orosco, Chavez, and Hernandez” have ancestors who were there before it was became a territory, a mere eight generations ago.
But sure, “immigration and race.” That’s the internecine tune the authoritarians want us to dance to, so why not dance.
We cut down the Fourth Amendment to get the devil, and now that the devil has turned ’round on us, we find the Fourth Amendment is flat.
Always the sub-adolescent bleat: “But whitey does it too!”
Blacks and Mexicans produce violent crimes and corruption at many multiples the white rate. They have efficiently turned prosperous white cities and towns into parasitic wastelands.
In their societies, this driver’s experience would be trivial. And their societies are what “liberals” have imported to ours. And for nothing more than the pathetically cheap frisson from disclaiming “I’m not racist!” Remember that line. Maybe “Dr. Odocha” would give a damn.
You’re a fool. The problem is authoritarianism, not race. The authoritarians love to have white fighting black: it plays right into their hands.
You’re also a coward: so afraid of the social consequences of having your name connected to your moronic theories that you cannot state those theories except anonymously.
You’re welcome to come back any time you want to put on your big boy pants and risk whatever social consequence there might be for being such a fool.
When I read this post I totally did not believe it. I thought it was a fake or something. But when I googled it and read the news reports I was truly shocked. I am shocked at the obvious incompetence of those doctors. I can understand that first anal probe with the fingers. After all, you got a cop standing there with a warrant. So it seems on the up and up to you. I can understand the first xray. After all, something could have been stuffed way up there where your fingers couldn’t reach. And people have been known to stuff some pretty strange things up their butts – gerbils anyone? https://urbanlegends.about.com/od/celebrities/a/richard_gere.htm
But after looking at the xray, any normal doctor should have just stopped right there.
And after the colon exam, what would have stopped them from taking a knife and actually cutting the dude open? How much you wanna bet they had a conversation about that while in the operating room after coming up empty with the colonoscopy?
I hope this guy wins BILLIONS of dollars.
The only part you got wrong was the first part. Warrant or no warrant, a doctor cannot treat a patient without the patient’s consent. The Deming ER doc got it right.
@Fred–I have an unhealthy habit of researching politics and history obsessively. This case is somewhat of an outlier…for now.
But acts I would never have accepted Americans doing, to other Americans, are now so routine that the other sheep sneer and jeer at me when I object.
Like walking through an airport scanner, or objecting to the pot-bellied pedophile touching my genitals. I’ve had neither–because we won’t fly, except for one annual trip on AeroMexico; and we’re both fully prepared to turn around and walk out of the airport if we’re forced through a scanner or groping.
But explain that to your fellow sheep, and be prepared for the mewling justifications to come dribbling forth.
That too came gradually; laptops, then belts, then shoes, then scanners, then groping to opt out of about 20 chest x-rays’ worth of radiation. The groping was an external pat-down; then it “patted” the genitals; now they reach inside the pants. Prisoner training.
I’ve considered it previously, and now the thought’s come raging back like never before–Get. Out. Now.
Because it’s not going to stop; it’s going to get worse. Too few are objecting…and tyrants always accelerate the abuse, it’s their nature.
As surprising and shocking as this story was, it was not as bad as this one about the guy left in solitary for 2 yrs and “forgetting” about him. https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/07/justice/new-mexico-inmate-settlement/
One last point and then i’m done, but my biggest problem with how these things are routinely handled. If the internal investigation doesn’t lead to the absolute necessity to prosecute these men then they will get off with nothing more than administrative consequences. They’ll hide behind the shield the city provides them, the tax payers will be penalized for their actions, and they’ll be back on law enforcement payroll before the year is out.
This isn’t a repeated sexual assault for the police involved, this is a small career blip. At least we can have some certainty that financial and social pressures will remove the doctors’ ability to assault someone like this again. But for the Govt officials, it’ll still be business as usual because they face no personal financial consequences for their actions.
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Is it clear that the limitation on health care liability applies? Although the people involved were physicians, they were engaged in the provision of health care. The procedures they performed were not for the purpose of diagnosis or treatment. It seems to me that this is not a case of improper medical care, subject to the limitation, but one of assault and battery that happens to have been committed by physicians.