Conjured Activism

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Is it really homicide?

September 23, 2005 at 12:06 am · Filed under current events

I read a very extended article in the NY Times today about the owners/managers of nursing homes and hospitals. Quite a few of them are being charged with negligent homicide, on multiple counts of, say 50, for the elderly and the sick who died under their care during the aftermaths of Katrina. I cannot even begin to imagine the stress and the feeling of “being responsible” that these caregivers must be going through. Adding charges of negligent homicide is just insult to injury, and it greatly angers me. “Being charged with homicide” is the typical example of passive language gone wrong. Who is charging these people with homicide? The government? The families of the dead? If the plaintiffs are the families, I think I can understand (though I would still disagree with the charges). If however, the city or the state or some cloud high-up organization is charging these people with homicide, I think that would be wholly unjustified.

Many of these people made the decision to stay put, with the patients and the elderly whom they took care of, based on their experience with hurricanes before, the information they were provided about Katrina, and their readily available backup supplies. And they made the right decisions! On numerous accounts, the NYTimes article cites that so-and-so felt relieved the day after Katrina passed, thinking that they scraped by with a few broken windows and no other really costly damages. If that were the entire story, this would be case closed, and these people would be heroes for not risking evacuating the weak.

However, that is not the entire story. The levees broke, but none of these caregivers could have predicted that! Whose fault was it that the levees failed? That certainly cannot be attributed to these owners/managers of nursing homes and hospitals. Most of the deaths for which these people are being charged are deaths that came AFTER the levees broke. Can we the really say that the deaths are due to the negligence of the caregivers? I don’t think that we can.

I feel that we are only able to assign blame now because in hindsight, we realize what all went wrong. It is easy now to say, well golly, those nursing homes and hospitals sure should have evacuated. Well duh they should have, but did they know that before Katrina came? No, they didn’t. They did not expect the hurricane to be any different to others that they have weathered. The difference with Katrina was the breakage of the levees, and again, there was no way that these people could have known that the levees would break. The government might have known. The city planner may have known. But these people did not know, and are not expected to know.

I really feel that instead of finding people to blame, we should just move on with our lives, move on to helping these people to move on. The point of natural disasters is that no one can really predict them, and we just have to render it to bad luck. These caretakers in hospitals and nursing homes should be the last people whom we target for blame. Yes, it is sad and unfortunate that people died under their cares, but I don’t doubt for once that they all tried to save as many lives as they could. Given the unpredictable nature of what happened, they really did do their best. They have enough on their conscience just thinking about the fact that tens of people died while under their care; they don’t need the law chasing them down telling them so unjustly.

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1 Comment »

Bracken King wrote @ September 23rd, 2005 at 8:47 am

While I don’t disagree with your post, I think its worth pointing out that if these people were actually in New Orleans, they were under a mandatory evacuation. Given that, I would guess that the legal “negligence” wasn’t due to not knowing the levees would break; it was likely due to ignoring the evacuation order. I would view it as somewhat analogous ignoring a fire alarm, thinking it was a false alarm. When you are responsible for the care of other people, I can see a legal case for negligent homocide (I doubt it’s a civil case because I think that’d be called wrongful death or something like that). However, it seems that this raises a larger issue: even if one can make a legal case, does that mean that one should? In this particular case, the workers clearly didn’t think the danger was too great or they wouldn’t have risked their own lives. Without knowing the specifics of this case, I could imagine that they may have evacuated personally, but remained in NO because they thought that that posed the smallest risk to the people in their care. In that event, it’s hard to imagine charging someone with a crime for doing what they thought was best, even if it wasn’t the best decision in retrospect.

Under normal circumstances, I would say that our legal system is set up to prosecute all crimes for which it can make a case, and in the event that it goes to trial, there is a jury of their peers that, while instructed to be impartial, are presumable more subjective than the courts in general. In this case, unless the defendants did something clearly negligent other than ignoring the evacuation, I can’t imagine any jury convicting them. That said, I think in this case that the government has better things to do; if nothing else, there were more obvious crimes committed in NO during/after the hurricane if not more deadly.

Sorry about the long post.