Dr. Joe Pellicer reports witnessing the malpractice trial of a physician friend. Without giving details, he asserts that the adverse incident in question was unavoidable. He reports that his friend was able to convince the jury of this, despite the plaintiffs’ lawyers insinuations, and that “[a]fter just minutes, the verdict came back: The jury absolved my friend of any wrongdoing.”

This would seem to be a showcase legal proceeding, then: a grieving family, whose relative died after treatment and discharge from the local ER, feared that something was amiss. (And why not? Patients are supposed to get better after treatment; it’s not surprising when a patient dies in the ER, but it’s surprising when a patient is discharged as healthy and then dies at home.) They brought action in the only authoritative forum our society provides for assessing facts in situations of that kind, and assessing fault and assigning damages. The jury heard arguments from both sides, weighed complicated technical information that the defendant himself presented to them as part of his defense, and arrived at a conclusion - one that Pellicer declares was correct on the facts. What’s the problem?
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