On March 2, I reported to Suffolk County Superior Court for jury duty, certain that I’d be let go after my day of service or excused, just like every other time. So it was a bit of a shock to find myself seated, by the end of the day, as Juror No. 14 on a medical malpractice trial that, according to the judge’s prediction, would take until March 23. (She was exactly right, as it turned out.)
I won’t dwell here on the irony of being forced to spend most of Mass Mobile Month immobile in the jury box, separated from my laptop and unable to use my cell phone. Being part of the 14-member jury on a three-week civil trial was no more of a hardship for me than it was for the other jurors, so I’m not going to complain. But I do want to share a few observations from the experience—some encouraging, some not. I’ll try to restrict myself mainly to talking about subjects related to technology and medicine, which were the big themes in the case.
The trial, in a nutshell, was about a health emergency that went undiagnosed far too long. The plaintiffs were an elderly church pastor from a Boston suburb and his wife. (I’m not going to use their names.) The pastor had a history of back trouble, but nothing incapacitating. The weekend before Thanksgiving in 2003, he began to experience unbearable back pain, and was taken to the ER of a local hospital (which I also will not name—if you want to go dig up the details, I’m sure there are public records).
Doctors there quickly determined that the pastor had a streptococcal infection in his bloodstream and started him on the appropriate antibiotics. They began a series of tests intended to locate the source of the infection and the pain. But the agony continued, and it wasn’t until five days later, after the pastor had been transferred to a prominent Boston hospital, that its true source was discovered.
An imaging study showed that the infection had taken root in the pastor’s spine in the form of a large epidural abscess, a pocket of pus inside the spinal canal between the bone and the dura, the outer lining of the spinal cord. As soon as the abscess was detected, surgeons operated to drain the pus. But by then it was too late. The abscess had pinched off the pastor’s spinal cord, causing permanent nerve damage. The pastor, now 75 years old, can’t walk on his own and suffers from a range of other disabilities.
The plaintiffs’ attorney was an outstanding Boston trial lawyer and medical malpractice specialist named Gregg Pasquale, of Keches Law Group. I’ve since learned that in the 1980s Pasquale was an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County, where he prosecuted murder cases. His fiery zeal was evident every day in our courtroom. Pasquale argued that the defendants in the case—a radiologist from the suburban hospital and two doctors from the Boston hospital—should have done more to diagnose the pastor’s problem.
One of the many difficulties in the pastor’s case was that the abscess didn’t appear on the standard MRI exam ordered by the ER doctor at the suburban hospital. But Pasquale argued that
