Personal Injury Law

Doctor Charged Criminally

In 2006, a disabled and brain damaged man, near death, was taken into an operating room at a California hospital in order to harvest his organs for donation. Law enforcement officials contend that what occurred in the operating room was a criminal act. The surgeon, Dr. Hootan Roozrokh has been criminally charged with prescribing excessive and improper doses of drugs, apparently in an attempt to hasten Mr. Navarro?s death to retrieve his organs sooner. The doctor is facing three felony counts relating to his actions

Central to the case is whether Dr. Roozrokh was pursuing organs at any cost or had become entangled in a web of misunderstanding about a lesser-used harvesting technique known as donation after cardiac death. Dr. Roozrokh has pleaded not guilty.

Transplanting organs from patients whose hearts have stopped, or cardiac-death donations, began to go out of vogue in the late 1960s and early ?70s after medical advances like life support and subsequent changes in the legal definition of death made donations from those declared brain dead more efficient. But health officials have encouraged cardiac-death donations in recent years.

There were 670 cardiac-death donations through the first nine months of 2007, the most in any year this decade, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees organ allocation. Over the same period, there were 12,553 brain-dead donations, according to the network.
In brain-death donations, the donor is legally dead, but machines keep the organs viable by machines. In cardiac-death donations, after the patient?s ventilator is removed, the heart slows. Once it stops, brain function ceases. Most donor protocols call for a five-minute delay before the patient is declared dead. Transplant teams are not allowed in the room of the potential donor before that.

Full post as published by Georgia Injury Lawyer Blog on February 29, 2008 (boomark / email).