We are outraged that a jury decided that Saranac Lake pediatrician Dr. Patricia Monroe owes $11 million to two teenage girls who were sexually abused by their half-brother almost a decade ago.
So far as we can tell, the only people who did anything wrong here are the half-brother, who did a year-and-a-half in a juvenile detention facility, and the lawyers of the O'Connell and Aronowitz firm, who expect to get a third of the proceeds of this awful lawsuit.
We feel horribly for the victims, but it appears these lawyers preyed on their emotions and twisted them into a greedy, scapegoating quest to destroy a trusted small-town medical practice by alleging a mistake that, even if true, would be minor.
If this unjust ruling holds up on Dr. Monroe's appeal, the O'Connell and Aronowitz lawyers will get a third of the $11 million, which they know will ultimately be paid by the general public, passed down through doctors' malpractice insurance bills. That's evil, and it shows how much power ambulance-chaser lawyers and insurance companies have to exploit in this country. It makes us, like so many other Americans, all the more hungry for tort reform. Unfortunately, that cause is hampered; these law firms and insurance companies lobby and donate heavily to our national politicians, influencing them more than a nation of exploited people can.
OK, we confess a preconceived bias here: We know Dr. Monroe to be an excellent, hard-working and extraordinarily conscientious physician.
But even someone we know and like could make a mistake.
But based on the facts of the case, we don't see how Dr. Monroe could have.
The claim was that she should have either called police or followed up after the girls' mother called her in August 2000 and said she had read in her then-9-year-old daughter's diary that the half-brother, then 14, had touched her on the outside of her underpants. While such touching is worrisome, it was not very severe as sexual abuse goes.
The actual abuse was much, much worse, but neither the mother nor Dr. Monroe knew that at the time. Police weren't contacted until February 2001, after one of the girls told her mother about the full extent of the rape and sodomy they had been enduring for months.
In that initial phone call, Dr. Monroe repeatedly asked to talk to the girl, but the mother didn't make that happen. Also, the mother told the doctor she had already taken steps to get counseling for her children, to separate the girls from their half-brother and to not leave them unattended. That was right of her. But it belies her statement this week to the Post-Star newspaper that "I turned it over to the doctor." No she didn't. She was actively trying to fix the problem herself, and when the doctor asked the mother to help her help the child, the mother didn't do it. Does this verdict mean that a doctor in such a case is required, by current law, to go to the woman's house to examine the child, or call the police to report word of a minor touching that the parent appears to be taking control of?
Besides, how can a mother legally "turn over" the responsibility of calling police about possible sex assaults happening to her own daughters, by her own son, in her own home, to someone else - someone who knows much less about it than she does?
Yes, the mother needed help, and she apparently sought it from the Lake Placid public and Catholic schools and Essex County as well as Dr. Monroe. Her daughters initially sued them along with Dr. Monroe, but all the suits were thrown out in November 2008 by the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which wrote, "The evidence shows that, at the time of the initial reports of abuse, Dr. Monroe had no reason to believe (the mother) was neglecting her duty to protect her daughters from abuse."
But in an epic sweep of injustice, that dismissal was overturned only for Dr. Monroe, pinning an unbearable penalty - professional ruination - on someone who didn't do anything wrong. We hope her appeal will vindicate her. We only wish it could prosecute the O'Connell and Aronowitz law firm for exploiting a battered nation of doctors and patients, all of whom will pay the price for this action. At least the girls' half-brother only abused two people.