Accused Doc Sues La. AG
A physician who stuck it out at a New Orleans hospital in disastrous conditions following Hurricane Katrina has filed a lawsuit against the state attorney general who accused her of killing four patients.
The lawsuit by Dr. Anna Pou claims some patients could not be saved in the chaotic situation caused by the state’s inability to evacuate the hospital. She claims Attorney General Charles Foti used the case to support his re-election bid, the Associated Press reports.
The suit seeks to compel the state to pay for Pou’s defense in civil lawsuits filed by patients’ families.
Foti announced the arrest of Dr. Anna Pou in a press conference last year, saying she and two nurses used a “lethal cocktail” to kill the patients.
“The state of Louisiana abandoned Dr. Pou and others during Hurricane Katrina and now she is being abandoned again by the state’s denial of a civil defense,” the suit says, according to an account in the Times-Picayune.
The suit says Foti’s office refused to pay for her defense costs because she is being sued for criminal conduct. But Pou says the decision has been compromised because Foti has a “vested interest in the indictment of Dr. Pou to salvage his credibility as a public official,” according to the Advocate.
Foti did not return phone calls seeking comment by the newspapers.
Pou is free on bond as a grand jury weighs whether to charge her. Prosecutors dropped the cases against the nurses to compel their grand jury testimony.
