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Oy, it's bad enough when shows and movies about the law absolutely butcher trial procedures. Arrested today, tried tomorrow! Attorneys presenting testimony and evidence instead of asking questions of witnesses! Attorneys dramatically ending their cross-examination of a witness by declaring they're calling a new witness! Yeah, none of those things happen in real life.
But tonight, Grey's Anatomy (which I'd always thought got the medicine part more or less right) is tackling medical malpractice. And it's ruining my Thursday night escapism because it's laughably inaccurate. Being me, I can't let this stuff go. Not from a show that's so far out of its regular field.
The surgery in question happened 4 months ago. As in earlier in 2013. And yet we're supposed to believe it's already reached trial. That would never, never, ever in a billion years happen. Few types of cases take longer to get to trial than medical malpractice cases. Why the hurdle for getting a law suit started on a medical malpractice claim is such that no law suit would ever even be filed only four months after a surgery. Try a year and a half.
And then it would be years more before the case saw the inside of a courtroom. Years of discovery and interrogatories and depositions and motions and expert consultations and etc., etc.
Ok, so it's ludicrous beyond belief that the case is already being tried 4 months after the surgery. Then we had a doctor on the stand trying to answer questions by the plaintiff's lawyer. She was clearly trying to explain why the defendant doctor did what she did and how it wasn't malpractice, but the plaintiff's lawyer cut her off, saying it was a yes/no question. The witness left in despair, being made to feel she hadn't been allowed to explain. Of course, in an actual trial, the defendant's lawyer also gets to question witnesses. Any decent trial lawyer would immediately start the examination of this witness by asking her to say what she'd wanted to say to the other lawyer. Crisis averted, problem solved.
Honestly, it's like they're not even trying. I hope Scandal doesn't try to get too far into any trial stuff. Girlfriend needs her harmless escapism free of really bad law stuff.
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3 comments:
They get the medical stuff sooooo wrong. So very, very, very wrong. Nothing on that show is accurate.
Well, yeah, I suspected as much. But at least with the medical stuff, I could pretend 'cause it all sounds good. That law stuff wouldn't have even seemed right to me before law school, though.
I know right? I only know because they had one epsiode about something I actually know about and I'm like oh my god ya'll are insane!! :)
And lets forget for one second that almost all of those attendings would have been strung up or could have for sexual harassment. Haha.
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