Jul 19, 2012

The James Ray Appeal

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.



Well, I felt this coming for the past two days. So, I'm not even a little surprised we're here. I guess it's nice that they're filing the appeal before Ray's released from his teeny-tiny sentence. I just have one question. Who is Daniel Collins, Esquire? Where's Luis Li? Where's Tom Kelly? Where's that valley girl... oh, what's her name... Truc Do? I'm guessing it's this Daniel Collins from Phoenix who spends 70% of his billable hours on bankruptcy and other credit related cases. Hmmm...

Writing in the brief, attorney Daniel Collins said, "Ray is entitled to a new trial because the trial court erroneously instructed the jury on omissions, and then compounded that error by defining 'duty' in a manner squarely prohibited by settled Arizona case law."

. . .

Collins argued that, if there was a duty at all, it would have been with James Ray International Inc., which failed to have enough medical personnel at the scene, didn't have a defibrillator, inadequate training, and failed to require medical exams for the participants.

Oh, right: JRI. The company in which every corporate office was held by James Ray. (Those meetings must have been fun: Malcovich. Malcovich. Malcovich. Malcovich.) Now where's Tom Kelly's giant company chart?



Here's the nuts and bolts:

• A secret meeting was held between the prosecution and medical examiners to convince them that the victims died of heatstroke instead of toxins released inside the steamy sweat lodge;

• A doctor who had no qualifications to determine the cause of death of the victims - he is an osteopath, not a medical doctor - testified, based on research he had done on websites Wikipedia and eMedicine, that toxins could not have been the cause;

• A prosecution witness who, it turned out, would have said the design of the sweat lodge itself was at fault was dropped. The defense was told he had not prepared a report to that effect, when he had;

• The state failed to disclose to the defense its "theory of the crime," a constitutional right, in a timely fashion.

Here's the thing. Osteopaths may not be MDs but they are medical doctors and they are licensed in every state to do what MDs do. In fact, any distinction at all is disappearing.

Osteopathic medicine is a branch of the medical profession in the United States. Osteopathic physicians are licensed to practice medicine and surgery in all 50 states and are recognized in fifty-five other countries, including all Canadian provinces.

. . .

In the 21st century, the training of osteopathic physicians in the United States is very similar to that of their M.D. counterparts.[2] Osteopathic physicians attend four years of medical school followed by at least three years of residency. They use all conventional methods of diagnosis and treatment. Though still trained in Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine (OMM),[3] the modern derivative of Still's techniques,[4][5] a minority of osteopathic physicians use it in actual practice.[6][7]

I don't know. Maybe Truc Do dropped in just long enough to butcher the medical stuff again. And to try to get even with her arch-nemesis, Dr. Dickson after he so thoroughly humiliated her. What a prick that guy is, what with all his knowing stuff. How dare a lowly D.O. be so much smarter than Do?

So funny. Just this morning I was sitting and sweating by the pool, waiting for my daughter to finish her lesson. And I couldn't stop thinking about the time I got stuck in the traffic  jam from hell in Phoenix for five hours and had to pick an extra night of hotel... in Yuma. I was thinking about how that was the home of Dr. Dickson and a whole lot of heatstroke. Synchronicities abound.

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