|
Abstract
|
A Colorado jury recently returned a homicide verdict against two paramedics for their role in a terrible, unexpected death. (Reuters. Dec. 23, 2023; http://tinyurl.com/yuj27hbv.)
They had arrived at a late-night scene in Aurora, a Denver suburb, where police had wrestled a young man into handcuffs, and even though he was clearly in distress, the medics neither talked to him nor really examined him, but they did give him a large shot of ketamine.
A few minutes later, the young man had a cardiac arrest in their ambulance. The medics frantically revived him, but he never fully recovered, and he died three days later in the hospital at the tragically young age of 23.
Both paramedics were convicted of criminally negligent homicide and face up to three years in jail. Only one police officer involved in the event has been convicted (of the same crime); all others were exonerated. So, it's mostly the health care workers facing prison time after this disastrous police-initiated event.
In fact, it was really prehospital emergency medicine on trial. The prosecution drilled down so heavily on the ketamine shot as a coup de grace that the jury considered the injection to be a physical assault. They also convicted the paramedic who gave that shot of assault in the second degree. That's punishable by two to six additional years in prison.
The medics justified their sedation plan on the grounds that they believed their patient, a young Black man named Elijah McClain, was experiencing excited delirium syndrome, and they were medicating him for that in accordance with their treatment protocols.
Yet that diagnostic concept is highly controversial, to the point that national medical organizations have been calling for a ban on the use of the terms excited delirium and excited delirium syndrome.
Banned Term
It has been argued that "excited delirium" is a racially-biased diagnosis. (West J Emerg Med. 2023;24[2]:152; http://tinyurl.com/bdvjc77m.) Some are also frustrated that police often cite excited delirium successfully in court or other investigative venues to argue that a person who died in their custody did so not because of anything the police did but from the patient's own drug abuse or decompensated mental illness. (Physicians for Human Rights. March 2, 2022; http://tinyurl.com/yveur82f.)...
Language: en |