A lot of things called themselves to my attention during my daily news search today, but one particular item demanded attention.
In spite of what you may have heard, not everyone (besides us) is thrilled with the failure to bring charges against anyone in relation to the alleged murders of patients in the days after Hurricane Katrina.
Black Agenda Report (BAR) has published and aired a scathing indictment of the district attorney and the grand jury for failing to “value the lives” of the victims enough to do anything more than just brush them off as an unfortunate accident.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford describes both the killings and the lack of concern on the part of the justice system as part of a larger pattern of institutional racism that played out in New Orleans in a deadly way for many people:
It’s easy to kill a Black person in New Orleans. Or a thousand. If you are a doctor, you can kill nine of your patients, and get away free. Doctors at a New Orleans hospital were absolved of all charges, when they willfully killed nine people, injecting them with lethal doses of drugs. The doctors were white, and they killed people who were mostly Black. So they got away with murder. In the New Orleans Medical Center crisis, we can see the real crisis in American society – that Black life is not held in as high a value as white life. Murder results.
Read the rest of Murder in New Orleans: No Big Thing on the Big Easy.
As readers of this blog know, the AMA has already announced plans to draft model legislation to make sure that future suspected murders by doctors in disaster areas don’t even get investigated. This will give them set them apart from the rule of law in ways that don’t apply to police or even to soldiers on the battlefield.
On a final note, we (at NDY) are grateful to Ford for speaking out on the racist aspects of the handling of the Katrina cases. We can’t help but wonder, though, if being both Black and disabled (as the Katrina hospital victims were) or both Latino and disabled (as Ruben Navarro was) increase the chances of deadly discrimination within the medical system. –Stephen Drake