Foti Goes Off Script
(7/26 /2007) - Times-Picayune - Stephanie Grace
If you're a law-and-order type like Attorney General Charlie Foti and you come up short in a big case, you're supposed to follow the usual script: Voice support for ordinary men and women who delivered the bad news. Swallow your anger and disappointment, and profess your ongoing faith in the system. Strive to remain gracious in defeat.
After an Orleans Parish grand jury refused to indict Dr. Anna Pou, the Memorial Medical Center physician Foti had arrested for allegedly murdering ailing patients in the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Foti did none of those things.
Instead, as he has during the whole saga, Foti made up his own script and pointedly refused to accept the end of his ballyhooed criminal case. During a defiant appearance in Baton Rouge after the grand jury decision was delivered Tuesday, he made it clear he would not stand down.
He said that, while he appreciates the grand jury's work, he regrets its conclusion -- backing up a statement by an assistant attorney general earlier in the day that "it's our position that it was homicide."
And he unloaded on District Attorney Eddie Jordan, accusing him of flubbing the case by not calling certain witnesses, including five experts that Foti said supported his thesis. So intent was Foti on pushing the issue that he distributed handy quotations from those experts for reporters, in a typeface so large they could be easily read on camera.
It was a performance that seemed designed to regain the public upper hand Foti enjoyed back in those heady days when he announced that he'd arrested Pou and two nurses (later dropped from the case by Jordan), in a press conference that aired live on CNN.
That was before the ground swelled with support for Pou and the other medical professionals trapped for days in an untenable situation. And it was before it became fully clear just how problematic the case would be.
Jordan makes a convenient scapegoat these days, but this case was destined to fall way short of the beyond-a-reasonable doubt standard, no matter who handled it.
All the experts in the world can't overcome the fact that, for the four patients Foti initially identified, Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard could not say whether the cause of death was homicide at all. All four deaths remain classified as undetermined.
Also, plenty of doctors said the drugs Pou says she used to relieve pain and anxiety are often used for that same purpose, and in the same combinations.
Then there was the fact that Foti, by ordering Pou arrested for murder rather than a lesser crime, dismissed the possibility of a mistake or a lapse in judgment. Instead, he created the expectation of a motive.
But Foti's most spectacular miscalculation was ignoring context, both then and now.
Cosmic justice demands that, if anyone is to be held accountable for the horrors of that week , the targets shouldn't be those who stayed and tried to save lives, but the people responsible for the official ineptitude and indifference in the first place.
That, of course, is impossible, and these Katrina deaths, like so many others, just aren't going to be avenged.
Foti's decision to target Pou may well be another matter.
He denies he was hoping to ride this case to re-election, but plenty of critics saw politics all over his pursuit of the prosecution, and they still do. A day after Foti released statements from the witnesses Jordan shunned, he tried to keep the debate alive by asking a district court judge to unseal portions of the grand jury proceedings.
Although the criminal case is over and done with, Foti seems to hope he can still shift overwhelmingly negative public opinion in his favor, as unlikely as that seems.
Foti's problem is this: If you keep following the same script, you're bound to keep getting the same reviews.
