READER DISCRETION ADVISED - Penile Prosthesis / Medical malpractice?

In the year 2000, our son Aaron broke his arm, but the doctor in the emergency room misdiagnosed it as a dislocation, which had to be repaired through surgery. I was researching about the Maine Health Security Act (MHSA) because of that litigation when I discovered a very disturbing case: Pease v. Kester.

Ms. Pease filed a claim against the doctor, Kester, who performed a penile prosthesis on a known rapist who had been incarcerated in Maine and other states...for a total of about twenty years. She felt the doctor had been professionally negligent.  

On March 30, 2004, Pease filed the present complaint, asserting that Dr. Kester owed her a duty of care to refrain from providing a non-medically necessary penile implant to Commeau without making a reasonable inquiry into his social and criminal history.

Doctor Kester claimed that Pease and her husband (who was suing for loss of consortium) had to bring the case as one of medical malpractice; and the reason he did that is those types of cases are governed by the Maine Health Security Act (MHSA), and provisions of the Act make it difficult to meet the requirements to ever get a case to trial.   

The judge dismissed the Pease's complaint. The decision in Kennebec County was 8 pages long, and at the end of it was listed the name of the judge: Donald Marden. Huh, I recognized it; he's the judge who affirmed the small claims court decision in 2004 in our case against the contractor Maine Wide Construction. 

And Marden was also the judge who denied Dennis Dechaine's motion for post-conviction review (PCR) after DNA testing years later proved his DNA did not match the one found on the murder victim in 1988. That DNA, which is believed to belong to the killer, has yet to be identified; and efforts by the group Trial and Error have thus far failed to get him a new trial, or release. And another connection I made was that one of the attorneys listed for the Pease's was Michaela Murphy, who represented Dennis for a while before being appointed as a judge.  

Dr. Kester was shielded because of legislation that Maine politicians passed making it near impossible to file and win cases against medical professionals. From my research I learned why they did this; it's because they feared that doctors would leave the state because of rising medical malpractice insurance costs...the increase which was wrongly being attributed to frivolous claims filed by patients. 

And was it really a medical malpractice case? Dr. Kester didn't operate on Ms Pease, but on the man who assaulted her, and it was because that operation was a success that she was assaulted! Here's a link to the Maine Supreme Court decision which affirmed (rubber-stamped) the Superior Court decision by Judge Don Marden. It's barely one page long.  

Pease v. Kester illustrates why we need healthcare reform, judicial accountability, and tort reform. 

As for Aaron's case, it was not dismissed, but the result was just as bad. The physician and her assistant had admitted in their initial reply to the claim: "a valid claim exists to defend against." Despite this, summary judgment was granted to the defendants by Superior Court Justice Ellen Gorman; I appealed and here's the decision by the Maine Supreme Court in Aaron Michaud v. Blue Hill Memorial et al . 

Here's some information at Wikipedia regarding summary judgment and also says what a judge and jury's duties are.