Canadian court acquits medics accused of negligence.
A Canadian court has acquitted four doctors and a US blood products company of criminal negligence in the case of four haemophiliacs who were infected with HIV after receiving transfusions of tainted blood in the 1980s.
After a five-year police investigation and a lengthy trial that involved more than 100 witnesses and 1,000 exhibits, Judge Mary Lou Benotto of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto effectively said that the doctors and the company were not only acquitted but fully exonerated.
“The allegations of criminal conduct on the part of these men and this corporation were not only unsupported by the evidence, they were disproved,” Benotto wrote in her 1 October decision. “The events here were tragic. However, to assign blame where none exists is to compound the tragedy.”
The case is the latest of numerous global investigations into the circumstances in which thousands of patients were given infected blood even after it became known, in autumn 1984, that heat treatment killed HIV in blood products. More than 1,000 Canadians, about 700 of them with haemophilia, were infected by HIV from transfusions, almost all of them before mid-1985.
The Canadian court case addressed the infection of 4 people in British Columbia and Alberta in 1986 and 1987. They received an HIV-infected blood-clotting product made by Armour Pharmaceutical, then a maker of blood products based in New Jersey.
The now-elderly doctors charged were Roger Perrault, then the national director of the Canadian Red Cross blood transfusion service; John Furesz, then director of Health Canada's Bureau of Biologics (BDB); Wark Boucher, who headed the BDB's blood product division; and Michael Rodell, then a vice-president of Armour Pharmaceutical.
The Canadian Hemophilia Society said it was “surprised and disappointed” by the outcome. “This verdict sends the wrong message to those responsible for the health of the public,” Pam Wilton, its president, said in statement.
But David Scott, an Ottawa lawyer who defended Furesz, said: “These charges were undoubtedly politically motivated. If those in charge of the criminal process succumb to political pressure to lay criminal charges in inappropriate cases, they will unwittingly undermine the public confidence in the administration of justice.”
Lawyers for the Crown didn't say whether they plan to appeal within the 30-day time frame allowed. “I cannot imagine them doing so,” says Edward Greenspan, the Toronto lawyer who represented Perrault. “But then again I couldn't imagine them spending 17 months in a court of law proving nothing.”
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