September 2008 Archives

Last Thursday, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the family of a Washington man whose brain was harvested for mental-health research when he died can pursue a lawsuit against King County as well as the institute that received the organ. The state Supreme Court unanimously found that a lower-court judge was wrong to dismiss all claims brought by the family of Jesse Smith, who died of heart problems in 2003 shortly after his 21st birthday. Smith was an organ donor, and his mother and her husband consented by phone to provide brain tissue to the nonprofit Stanley Medical Research Institute of Maryland. Instead of taking a small tissue sample, however, the King County Medical Examiner's office provided the entire brain.

Recently there has been an emerging national trend toward recognizing limited animal rights on the estate planning front, but a Michigan appeals court has taken a traditional view of the law concerning a man convicted of sodomizing a sheep.

Jeffrey Scott Haynes, 45, a habitual offender who is serving a 2½- to 20-year prison term for sodomy will not have to register as a sex offender once he is released. As outrageous as his conduct was, a three-judge panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals described it as his "abominable and detestable crime against nature," the victimized sheep doesn't qualify as an "individual" under state law. The court said the sheep was the "object" of Haynes' crime, but held that he would have had to commit a crime against a human being to qualify for the sex offender registry, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Trucking companies should work harder to ensure that their drivers get required rest, and the government should move toward mandating the use of alarm systems to alert exhausted truckers, a safety commission from the National Transportation Safety Board recommended last week.

The board hearing, held in Washington, D.C., and streamed live on the Internet, was held in response to an early-morning crash in western Wisconsin three years ago in which a bus carrying a high school band slammed into an overturned semitrailer, killing five people.

The vast majority of emergency room patients are discharged without understanding the treatment they received or how to care for themselves once they get home. A new study following patients from two Michigan hospitals shows that 78 percent of patients did not understand at least one of four elements of their hospital care. The four elements considered were: their diagnosis, their E.R. treatment, instructions for their at-home care and warning signs of when to return to the hospital.

A horrifying truck accident which occurred last week in Denver demonstrates the uncertainty as to with whom you may be sharing the road. Last Thursday Francis Hernandez, 23, was driving a Chevrolet Suburban when he crashed into a Mazda pickup truck that was turning into a Good Times in Aurora. The collision drove the pickup into a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop, killing two women in the truck and a 3-year-old boy waiting for ice cream.

Aurora police had stopped Hernandez in April for speeding, and failing to signal for a turn. They found he had two outstanding warrants for failure to appear in Adams County and Arapahoe County. That arrest was one of 16 that Hernandez racked up over five years, most of them for driving offenses. He is also suspected of being in the country illegally.