Date: 11/21/2008
Associated Press Writer
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) _ A man accused of beating his stepdaughter so severely that she suffered a permanent brain injury — triggering a right-to-die case — testified Friday that he never hit her and believed his wife’s claims that the girl injured herself.
Jason Strickland denied prosecutors’ claims that he and his late wife, Holli, beat 11-year-old Haleigh Poutre into a coma in September 2005.
Haleigh was at the center of the right-to-die debate after the state received court permission to remove her feeding tube. But she began showing signs of improvement days later and can now perform simple tasks such as feeding herself and writing her name. She remains in a Boston rehabilitation hospital.
Strickland, 34, portrayed Haleigh as a troubled child who was once admitted to the hospital for an eating disorder. He said she had a habit of biting the side of her mouth until it bled and that her nose was “typically red” from continually picking at an old scab.
Strickland testified that his wife told him repeatedly over a five-year period that Haleigh caused a litany of injuries, including bruises, burns and cuts to various parts of her body.
He said that during the year before Haleigh suffered her near-fatal brain injury, Holli Strickland was taking her to see a nurse practitioner on a weekly basis to perform body checks “because Haleigh was hurting herself.”
Strickland said when he noticed bruises or other marks on Haleigh, his wife told him the girl hurt herself.
“Most of the time, Holli would explain to me what happened,” Strickland said.
He recalled one time when Haleigh had a badly bruised and swollen foot, with bloody toenails.
“What did Holli tell you?” Black asked.
“That she was dropping a bowling ball on her foot,” Strickland replied.
Jason Strickland is the only person to stand trial for Haleigh’s injuries. Holli Strickland died in an apparent murder-suicide with her grandmother after she and Jason were charged in the 2005 beating. Haleigh was adopted at age 7 by Holli, her aunt.
Strickland, who married Holli in 2002, said he never hit Haleigh or her younger sister, Samantha, but acknowledged giving each girl an occasional “tap” on the back of the head “to get her attention.”
“But never in a disciplinary fashion,” he said.
Earlier in the trial, Samantha Poutre, now 12, testified that she saw Jason Strickland push Haleigh down the stairs the day she suffered the brain injury. But Samantha, who was 9 at the time, pointed to the wrong man when asked to identify Strickland in the courtroom.
Haleigh was comatose and on life support for several months. After doctors said she had no hope of recovery, the state Department of Social Services got court permission to withdraw her feeding tube. Days later, Haleigh began to show signs of improvement.
The state was criticized for moving too quickly, and the case helped spark an overhaul of Massachusetts’ child welfare system, including the creation of a new Office of the Child Advocate.
The state also was denounced for failing to protect Haleigh in the years before she was hospitalized.
Records showed the state had received more than a dozen complaints about cuts and other marks seen on Haleigh between 2001 and 2005. But the agency determined the girl’s injuries were self-inflicted and did not remove her from the Strickland home in Westfield.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
Italy: Father can end daughter’s life support
Date: 11/13/2008
By ARIEL DAVID
Associated Press Writer
ROME (AP) _ Italy’s highest court ruled Thursday in favor of a man’s request to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube and allow her to die after 16 years in a vegetative state.
Courts, politicians and the Vatican have weighed in on the fate of Eluana Englaro, who fell into a vegetative state following a car accident in 1992, when she was 20.
The Court of Cassation said it had rejected an appeal by prosecutors against a lower court ruling in July in favor of Beppino Englaro. The father had said his daughter visited a friend in a coma shortly before her accident and expressed the will to refuse treatment in the same situation.
Italy does not allow euthanasia using methods such as fatal doses of drugs. Patients have a right to refuse treatment, but no law allows them to have a living will in case they become unconscious.
Beppino Englaro had fought a decade-long court battle to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube.
The decision “confirms that we live under the rule of law,” he was quoted as saying by the ANSA news agency.
Catholic and anti-euthanasia groups had protested the ruling by the lower court in Milan in front of the city’s Duomo.
Conservative politicians reacted angrily to Thursday’s ruling, saying that the courts had overstepped their bounds. Enrico La Loggia, a lawmaker in Permier Silvio Berlusconi’s party, likened the decision to a “death sentence.”
The Vatican’s top health official, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, was quoted by the Apcom agency as saying that disconnecting a feeding tube amounts to “killing a person.”
Eluana Englaro has been kept in a hospital and fed artificially in the northern city of Lecco. Doctors have called her condition irreversible.
Her case has evoked comparisons to that of Terry Schiavo, the American woman at the center of a right-to-die debate until her death in 2005. Schiavo was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after her heart stopped in 1990.
Schiavo’s husband, who wanted her feeding tube removed against her parents’ wishes, prevailed in a polarizing battle in the United States that reached Congress, President Bush and the Supreme Court.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By ARIEL DAVID
Associated Press Writer
ROME (AP) _ Italy’s highest court ruled Thursday in favor of a man’s request to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube and allow her to die after 16 years in a vegetative state.
Courts, politicians and the Vatican have weighed in on the fate of Eluana Englaro, who fell into a vegetative state following a car accident in 1992, when she was 20.
The Court of Cassation said it had rejected an appeal by prosecutors against a lower court ruling in July in favor of Beppino Englaro. The father had said his daughter visited a friend in a coma shortly before her accident and expressed the will to refuse treatment in the same situation.
Italy does not allow euthanasia using methods such as fatal doses of drugs. Patients have a right to refuse treatment, but no law allows them to have a living will in case they become unconscious.
Beppino Englaro had fought a decade-long court battle to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube.
The decision “confirms that we live under the rule of law,” he was quoted as saying by the ANSA news agency.
Catholic and anti-euthanasia groups had protested the ruling by the lower court in Milan in front of the city’s Duomo.
Conservative politicians reacted angrily to Thursday’s ruling, saying that the courts had overstepped their bounds. Enrico La Loggia, a lawmaker in Permier Silvio Berlusconi’s party, likened the decision to a “death sentence.”
The Vatican’s top health official, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, was quoted by the Apcom agency as saying that disconnecting a feeding tube amounts to “killing a person.”
Eluana Englaro has been kept in a hospital and fed artificially in the northern city of Lecco. Doctors have called her condition irreversible.
Her case has evoked comparisons to that of Terry Schiavo, the American woman at the center of a right-to-die debate until her death in 2005. Schiavo was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after her heart stopped in 1990.
Schiavo’s husband, who wanted her feeding tube removed against her parents’ wishes, prevailed in a polarizing battle in the United States that reached Congress, President Bush and the Supreme Court.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
US family opposes end to care for brain-dead boy
Date: 11/8/2008
By DAVID B. CARUSO
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ A U.S. hospital has asked a judge for permission to stop treating a brain-dead 12-year-old cancer patient, even though his ultra-religious New York parents want to keep him on life support.
Motl Brody of Brooklyn was pronounced dead this week after a half-year fight against a brain tumor, and doctors at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington say the seventh-grader’s brain has ceased functioning entirely.
But for the past few days, a machine has continued to inflate and deflate his lungs. As of late Friday afternoon, his heart was still beating with the help of a cocktail of intravenous drugs and adrenaline.
That heartbeat has prompted Motl’s parents, who are Orthodox Jews, to refuse the hospital’s request to remove all artificial life support.
Under some interpretations of Jewish religious law, including the one accepted by the family’s Hasidic sect, death occurs only when the heart and lungs stop functioning.
That means Motl “is alive, and his family has a religious obligation to secure all necessary and appropriate medical treatment to keep him alive,” the family’s attorney wrote in a court filing this week.
The family has asked the hospital to leave the breathing machine on and keep administering drugs until the boy’s heart and lungs no longer respond.
Disagreements between families and medical providers over when to end care for terminally ill patients are common, experts say, but this case wound up in court with unusual speed.
Unlike Terri Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlan, who became the subjects of right-to-die battles when they suffered brain damage and became unconscious, Motl’s condition has deteriorated beyond a persistent vegetative state, his physicians say. His brain has died entirely, according to an affidavit filed by one of his doctors.
His eyes are fixed and dilated. His body neither moves nor responds to stimulation. His brain stem shows no electrical function, and his brain tissue has begun to decompose.
“This is death at its simplest,” the hospital’s lawyers wrote in a court filing.
The hospital said it would help the family move what it called the boy’s “earthly remains” to another medical facility, but has found none willing to accept a brain-dead child.
The dispute wound up in court Sunday, when the family asked a federal judge to block the hospital from doing any further tests for brain activity.
The hospital responded by asking a District of Columbia Superior Court judge for permission to discontinue treatment.
Jeffrey I. Zuckerman, the attorney for Motl’s parents, says they have been “utterly shattered” by the hospital’s actions.
He stressed that the family’s demand for continued life support was based on their obligations under religious law, not an unrealistic hope that their boy will recover.
“You can always hope for a miracle, but if you are asking if they are in denial about their child’s medical condition, no, they are not,” Zuckerman said.
A hearing was scheduled for Monday, but Children’s National Medical Center said it would ask for a postponement until Wednesday.
“We respect the family’s beliefs, and have tried since the patient’s arrival in June to work closely with them in a spirit of mutual respect,” the hospital said in a written statement.
It added, however, that attempts to discuss end-of-life issues with the family had been complicated.
Motl’s mother and father, Eluzer and Miriam Brody, haven’t been to the hospital since July. The medical center says its requests to speak directly with them have been rebuffed, and in recent days, hospital employees “have been inundated with harassing and threatening calls” regarding the case.
A substantial delay in resolving the disagreement may render it moot. The hospital suggested in legal filings that the boy’s remaining body functions will cease within weeks, if not days.
Dr. Edward Reichman, an associate professor of medicine at Albert Einstein Medical College in New York, said the question of how to accommodate religious beliefs regarding brain death comes up occasionally in New York, where there is a large population of Orthodox Jews.
While there is intense debate over whether to accept brain death as the spiritual end of life, hospitals usually find a way to work through it, he said.
“More often than not, the medical team … will accept the wishes of the family, especially if cardiac death is anticipated in a short window of time,” he said.
Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said physicians aren’t obligated to provide care that can’t possibly be medically helpful.
“Doctors are well within their rights to say, ‘We are stopping,’” he said. “I don’t think medicine can become subservient to religious, spiritual or mystical hopes and beliefs concerning how to manage death.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By DAVID B. CARUSO
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ A U.S. hospital has asked a judge for permission to stop treating a brain-dead 12-year-old cancer patient, even though his ultra-religious New York parents want to keep him on life support.
Motl Brody of Brooklyn was pronounced dead this week after a half-year fight against a brain tumor, and doctors at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington say the seventh-grader’s brain has ceased functioning entirely.
But for the past few days, a machine has continued to inflate and deflate his lungs. As of late Friday afternoon, his heart was still beating with the help of a cocktail of intravenous drugs and adrenaline.
That heartbeat has prompted Motl’s parents, who are Orthodox Jews, to refuse the hospital’s request to remove all artificial life support.
Under some interpretations of Jewish religious law, including the one accepted by the family’s Hasidic sect, death occurs only when the heart and lungs stop functioning.
That means Motl “is alive, and his family has a religious obligation to secure all necessary and appropriate medical treatment to keep him alive,” the family’s attorney wrote in a court filing this week.
The family has asked the hospital to leave the breathing machine on and keep administering drugs until the boy’s heart and lungs no longer respond.
Disagreements between families and medical providers over when to end care for terminally ill patients are common, experts say, but this case wound up in court with unusual speed.
Unlike Terri Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlan, who became the subjects of right-to-die battles when they suffered brain damage and became unconscious, Motl’s condition has deteriorated beyond a persistent vegetative state, his physicians say. His brain has died entirely, according to an affidavit filed by one of his doctors.
His eyes are fixed and dilated. His body neither moves nor responds to stimulation. His brain stem shows no electrical function, and his brain tissue has begun to decompose.
“This is death at its simplest,” the hospital’s lawyers wrote in a court filing.
The hospital said it would help the family move what it called the boy’s “earthly remains” to another medical facility, but has found none willing to accept a brain-dead child.
The dispute wound up in court Sunday, when the family asked a federal judge to block the hospital from doing any further tests for brain activity.
The hospital responded by asking a District of Columbia Superior Court judge for permission to discontinue treatment.
Jeffrey I. Zuckerman, the attorney for Motl’s parents, says they have been “utterly shattered” by the hospital’s actions.
He stressed that the family’s demand for continued life support was based on their obligations under religious law, not an unrealistic hope that their boy will recover.
“You can always hope for a miracle, but if you are asking if they are in denial about their child’s medical condition, no, they are not,” Zuckerman said.
A hearing was scheduled for Monday, but Children’s National Medical Center said it would ask for a postponement until Wednesday.
“We respect the family’s beliefs, and have tried since the patient’s arrival in June to work closely with them in a spirit of mutual respect,” the hospital said in a written statement.
It added, however, that attempts to discuss end-of-life issues with the family had been complicated.
Motl’s mother and father, Eluzer and Miriam Brody, haven’t been to the hospital since July. The medical center says its requests to speak directly with them have been rebuffed, and in recent days, hospital employees “have been inundated with harassing and threatening calls” regarding the case.
A substantial delay in resolving the disagreement may render it moot. The hospital suggested in legal filings that the boy’s remaining body functions will cease within weeks, if not days.
Dr. Edward Reichman, an associate professor of medicine at Albert Einstein Medical College in New York, said the question of how to accommodate religious beliefs regarding brain death comes up occasionally in New York, where there is a large population of Orthodox Jews.
While there is intense debate over whether to accept brain death as the spiritual end of life, hospitals usually find a way to work through it, he said.
“More often than not, the medical team … will accept the wishes of the family, especially if cardiac death is anticipated in a short window of time,” he said.
Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said physicians aren’t obligated to provide care that can’t possibly be medically helpful.
“Doctors are well within their rights to say, ‘We are stopping,’” he said. “I don’t think medicine can become subservient to religious, spiritual or mystical hopes and beliefs concerning how to manage death.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney