Why Is It Important To Have A Civil Rights Attorney Who Understands The Medicine?
A trial lawyer needs to have a great command of the medicine involved in your particular case, especially if your loved one died as a result of a complex but avoidable medical condition due to the neglect of those in charge of his/her welfare. As you have to explain intricate and complex medical conditions to lay people, you have to be able to explain a complex subject and break it down into a simple subject.
Other examples of mastering the medicine involves inmates whose known medical condition have been deplorably neglected by the correctional staff resulting in either a serious aggravation of their condition or sometimes resulting in death. The jail facility will always blame the inmate claiming their death in custody was unavoidable and merely a coincidence of the person being in custody. This is oftentimes an absurd defense when you can prove that an inmate suffered from an urgent medical condition but was ignored, and through the use of medical experts you can establish that had the inmate received timely medical care, the victim more likely than not would have survived.
Correctional nurses and doctors have a duty to treat and provide timely healthcare to inmates. A correctional officer has a duty to safeguard the inmates under their watch and to report an inmate in physical distress to medical staff. The inmate, who does not have the option to choose his medical provider nor to summon “911” , is exclusively reliant upon those in charge of their custody. And when these professionals fail to uphold their standard of care, it is the inmate/patient who suffers the consequence of their failure.
Again, it is a travesty that in each and every case during which an inmate is left to die in a cell, such neglect and dereliction of duty is directly caused by deliberate indifference of the medical and correctional staff. Seldom will the county coroner attribute any fault upon those who were in immediate charge of the inmate.
That is why the best recourse against these types of misconduct is to file a civil rights action against the offending agency and their employees. These types of cases often time will rely upon a 14th or an 8th Amendment violation against cruel and unusual punishment in which a person’s medical care has suffered as a result of the offending correctional staff’s deliberate indifference to a serious medical condition.
