A Texas jury threw the book at a disgraced surgeon who caused the death of two patients and maimed several others, sentencing him to life behind bars.
Jurors in the Dallas County trial handed down the stiffest punishment Monday for ex-neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch, who last week was convicted of felony injury to an elderly person.
Prosecutors accused Duntsch of numerous cases of malpractice, including crippling four patients and killing two others between July 2012 and June 2013.
They said Duntsch, 44, of Plano, improperly placed screws and plates in patients’ spines and left a sponge in another patient.
The sentence “won’t obviously bring my mom back and it won’t heal the 34 people that have been affected,” said Caitlin Martin-Linduff, whose mother, Kellie Martin, died in 2012 following back surgery. “But it will bring some sense of justice and particularly some sense of closure.”
Records also showed that Duntsch operated on the wrong part of a patient’s spine and left one woman wheelchair-dependent.
Defense attorneys tried to paint the dirty doc, who had 17 years of experience, as simply an unskilled surgeon.
Duntsch was found guilty of maiming Mary Efurd, who lost a third of her blood volume and the use of a leg following her 2012 surgery.
“I trusted him. I trusted that he would do what was right,” Efurd, who was 74 at the time, testified during the trial.
Duntsch faced five to 99 years or life in prison. He also could have been given probation.
With Post wires
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
