A Baltimore Circuit Court jury ruled that staff at Maryland Shock Trauma Center did not discriminate against a gay man when they barred him from his partner's deathbed.
William Robert Flanigan Jr. filed suit against the medical center alleging that hospital employees blocked him from seeing his partner, Robert Lee Daniel, while he lay dying from complications due to AIDS. For more than six hours Flanigan was not permitted to see Daniel, despite his having power of attorney, because he was "not family." Flanigan was unable to tell doctors that his partner did not want breathing tubes or a respirator used. Daniel feared dying alone in a hospital and had signed power of attorney document to allow Flanigan to make medical decisions on his behalf. The document said Daniel did not want life-sustaining intervention. Flanigan was allowed to see Daniel only after his mother, Grace Daniel, arrived from New Mexico, whereupon hospital officials allowed her to escort Flanigan to see his partner. By that time, Daniel had slipped into a coma.
Initially, hospital staff told Flanigan and Grace Daniel that they were unable to find Flanigan's power of attorney document. Later, and during the trial, it was claimed that doctors were simply too busy to let Flanigan in to see his companion, before he passed into a coma. In court, the chief physician at Shock Trauma, Dr. Thomas Scalea, claimed that Flanigan's power of attorney was irrelevant because Daniel consented to the surgery and breathing tube apparatus which Flanigan maintained Daniel was terrified of. Before trial, Flanigan and his attorney, David Buckel of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, said that Daniel tried to rip the tubes out of his throat until staff members restrained his arms.
When the incident became public, representatives of Shock Trauma said that allegations of anti-gay discrimination against Daniel and Flanigan were based on a miscommunication between the busy staff and Flanigan. After reading their verdict in favor of Shock Trauma, forewoman Bailey Fine told The Baltimore Daily Record that the jury hoped "to tell the University of Maryland Medical System that they have to figure out a better way of communicating with people in the waiting room."
Copyright © March 2, 2003 by Bruce Garrett
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