Grappling with ethical questions about organ transplants, a San Luis Obispo jury on Thursday acquitted a surgeon accused of trying to speed a potential donor's death.
The case against Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, believed to be the first of its kind in the United States, was watched intensely by doctors and other professionals involved in transplant surgeries. Experts had feared that a conviction would turn away potential donors, their families and even some of the doctors who harvest organs.
During the two-month trial, Roozrokh was cast by prosecutors as a predator who crossed ethical boundaries in a failed attempt to acquire organs from a dying 25-year-old patient.
The defense contended that Roozrokh acted only with compassion toward Ruben Navarro, a comatose 70-pound man afflicted with a painful, wasting neurological disease.
Jurors found Roozrokh not guilty of dependent adult abuse, a felony that carries a prison sentence of up to four years. In a handwritten note read in court by San Luis Obispo Superior Court Judge Martin Tangeman, the jury said the case highlights the need for well-defined ethical standards in the transplant procedure known as "donation after cardiac death."
Those standards "will be an important part of Ruben's legacy, and for that we pay him our respects and owe him our thanks," the jurors said.
On the night of Feb. 3, 2006, Navarro was close to death at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo. He had suffered a heart attack days earlier at a nearby care home. His mother had given permission for organ donation, and a team that included Roozrokh flew in from San Francisco on behalf of a regional transplant network.
Roozrokh, who had just completed a Stanford University fellowship months before, was to supervise a donation after cardiac death, a procedure that had never been performed at the 165-bed hospital. In most transplants, the removal of organs occurs only after a patient is declared brain-dead. In donations after cardiac death, a patient's brain is irreversibly damaged but still functioning minimally. With a family's consent, the patient is removed from life support and, once the heart has stopped, the patient is declared dead, and organs may be removed minutes later. Many experts say, however, that organs are usable only if they can be retrieved within 30 minutes after the machines are turned off.
