Jury Vs Grand Jury

“Along the way and in 1987, these 2 house staffers will be taken before a grand jury for possible murder charges and while the grand jury will not charge them with murder, it will charge them with 38 counts of gross negligence &/or gross incompetence. Under New York law, the investigative body for these charges was the Hearing Committee of the State Board for Professional Medical Conduct and between April 1987 and January 1989, this committee will have conducted 30 hearings at which 33 witnesses, including expert witnesses in toxicology, emergency medicine, and chairmen of internal medicine departments at six prominent medical schools will testify, and many of whom will state under oath that they had never heard of the interaction between
phenelzine and meperidine i.e. the serotonin syndrome, prior to this case. The state board of medical examiners in New York and the board will unanimously decide that none of the 38 grand jury charges against the two young residents/doctors was supported by evidence and that this had not been criminal negligence, nor murder, but rather it had been an honest mistake, made by good people and that this drug interaction/serotonin syndrome was virtually unknown by all doctors at the time, regardless of their level of training &/or experience! In 1989, New York State will declare the Libby Zion Law that will help curtail the long hours house staff in New York State work, but it will only be in 2003 and when the ACGME accepts and acts on the concept that house staffers are indeed overworked and poorly supervised, that medical schools all over the US and Canada will reduce the hours worked by house staffers. Not every medical school will quickly and totally accept that working >80 hours a week is too much and some and likely many, will try to find other ways to get more hours for both work and training out of their house staffers.