Dallas Neurosurgeon Duntsch Found Guilty, Faces Life in Prison
It took a jury just four hours to convict Christopher Duntsch of a first degree felony for harming an elderly woman in his operating room. He stared forward, seemingly in a daze, after the verdict was read, just as he had for the two weeks of testimony. Duntsch’s case is perhaps unique to the justice system—it’s incredibly rare for a surgeon to be indicted, much less convicted, for the care he or she provided. But Duntsch was uniquely egregious.
He was indicted on five counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and a single count of harming an elderly person. The prosecution chose to try the latter charge and built a macabre road map of patients that ended with the elderly victim, Mary Efurd, on the surgical table at Dallas Medical Center in 2012. She was 74 at the time of her surgery, what should’ve been a simple fusion of two vertebrae. Yet she woke up with severe pain from the fusion hardware being misplaced in her soft muscle. She had severed nerve roots and misplaced screw holes on the opposite side of her spine.
Seated in a wheelchair in a turquoise jumpsuit, she spoke to reporters with tears in her eyes moments after the verdict.
“I think it’s going to be like a floodgate that’s going to really open, crying. I’ll do some crying. And I’ll reflect back on how difficult those first months were afterwards. I had so much anger, because my life changed so much. I was very independent and I had to become dependent on others for transportation, for my meals, for a lot of things,” she said. “I think all of us will be thinking about things like this, and hopefully there will be some tighter controls, more accountability in a lot of areas so something like this won’t happen again. It shouldn’t happen again.”
Read more: http://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2017/02/a-jury-now-controls-the-fate-of-neurosurgeon-christopher-duntsch/?ref=feat-hp
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