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Euthanasia story prompts libel suit
A doctor who was at Memorial Medical Center in the days after Hurricane Katrina has filed a federal libel suit claiming an article published in The New York Times Magazine in August defamed him by suggesting he knew of euthanasia at the hospital and failed to stop it.
The lawsuit filed by Dr. William Armington, a neuroradiologist who previously practiced in the New Orleans area and now lives in Oregon, claims the article "propagated false, misleading, and damaging statements, directly or through inference and innuendo, that Dr. Armington was aware of, participated in, and failed to stop criminal homicide or criminal manslaughter at Memorial Medical Center."
The lawsuit is filed against the Times, the author, Dr. Sheri Fink, and ProPublica.org, a nonprofit news organization where Fink works. A spokeswoman for the Times said in an e-mail that the paper is "confident the story is accurate," adding, "We intend to defend the suit vigorously." Richard Tofel, general manager for ProPublica, made a similar pledge.
The article contained new details about what happened at the hospital, including quoting two physicians -- but not Armington -- who said they gave patients morphine and other drugs with the knowledge their actions would hasten the patients' deaths.
After the storm, then-Attorney General Charles Foti's investigation into nine of the deaths at Memorial focused on Dr. Anna Pou and two nurses. Pou was arrested for second-degree murder in 2006 in connection with four of those deaths, but a state grand jury in 2007 refused the charges. The two nurses were given immunity by Orleans Parish prosecutors in exchange for their testimony.
The 13,000-word article contains two paragraphs that refer to Armington. In the first paragraph, Armington comments on a group decision by physicians to evacuate the patients with do-not-resuscitate orders last. In the second paragraph, Fink wrote that Armington "suspected euthanasia might occur" based on a discussion with another doctor and noted he didn't "intervene directly" with other physicians sedating the patients....
