Podcast Episode: UAMS Doctors And Legal Fallout
Pip: When a public institution charges four thousand dollars a night for a room you can’t leave, you’d hope the legal system might have something to say about that.
Mara: That’s exactly the territory LauraLynnHammett is covering on A Higher Law — a lawsuit against UAMS doctors over allegations of forced medical detention, and the procedural obstacles that keep arising before those claims can even be heard on the merits.
Pip: Let’s start with how the sheriff’s office handled service of process.
Sheriff’s Office Drops the Ball on Service
Mara: The core question here is whether a plaintiff can be quietly set up to fail — paying for a service that isn’t delivered until it’s too late to matter.
Pip: The post lays it out plainly: “unable to serve in time for court” — that’s what Deputy Joseph Shackleford filed, word for word, for each of the three defendants.
Mara: The summonses against Dr. Elizabeth Brown, Dr. Mary Katie Kimbrough, and Speech-Language Pathologist Emily Gray arrived at the sheriff’s office on the morning of April 30, 2026. The deadline to serve was midnight, May 7. Nobody warned the plaintiff that a delay was coming, which would have allowed time to hire a private process server instead.
Pip: Fifty dollars per defendant, three non-serves, and a timely motion for extension that Judge Cara Connors denied — though she did leave the door open for a refiled motion with more specific documentation of good cause.
Mara: Which brings us directly to the underlying dispute those defendants were being summoned to answer.
The Detention Claims and the Fight to Keep Them in Court
Mara: The central question in this segment is whether a lawsuit alleging two weeks of forced medical confinement will survive procedural challenges before a court ever examines what actually happened to Sean Lynn.
Pip: The post responding to Dr. Benjamin Davis’s motion to dismiss puts the allegation plainly. The complaint states: “Despite repeatedly referring to Sean as being on a 72-hour hold, Defendants failed to produce, serve, or document any lawful hold order. Instead, defendants including but not limited to Benjamin Davis, repeatedly restarted or extended purported holds without notice, process, or legal authority, subjecting Sean to continuous confinement.”
Mara: What that means in practice is that the legal mechanism used to justify keeping someone hospitalized — a documented hold order — allegedly never existed. The confinement continued anyway, for two weeks.
Pip: The response brief goes deep on specificity, listing paragraph after paragraph from the complaint: drug infusions ordered without consent, food withheld, physical restraints, Sean running down hallways trying to leave. Davis’s name appears sixty-five times in the medical records provided to the plaintiffs.
Mara: Davis argued the complaint lacked sufficient factual detail to proceed. The response counters that the complaint was never meant to be exhaustive — it was a representative sample, and the brief demonstrates it clears Arkansas’s fact-pleading bar considerably.
Pip: There’s also a surveillance video problem. The response notes that footage from hallways and stairwells that would show when Davis entered the room of confinement was not preserved — and that Davis did not request its preservation. The brief signals the plaintiffs intend to seek spoliation sanctions.
Mara: The second post in this segment, titled “Nanny, Nanny, You Can’t Catch Us,” addresses a parallel motion to dismiss filed by two other defendants, Dr. Jennings Boyette and Dr. Sriram Navuluri. Their motion was filed while a court-authorized refiled extension motion was still pending and unresolved.
Pip: The brief argues that’s premature by definition — you can’t dismiss for a service defect that’s the subject of a motion the court itself invited.
Mara: And even if dismissal were appropriate, the brief argues it must be without prejudice, because Sean Lynn’s potential Section 1983 claims — constitutional claims carrying a three-year limitations period — have never been filed in any proceeding and remain viable.
Pip: That distinction matters. Medical negligence and constitutional deprivation of rights are legally separate tracks. Dismissing one with prejudice can’t be used to foreclose the other.
Mara: The post steps back from the legal briefs to make a broader observation: “A right that can be ignored without consequence is not much of a right at all.” That’s the thread running through both the Davis response and the Boyette-Navuluri opposition — whether procedural mechanisms are being used to prevent courts from ever reaching the substance of what happened.
Pip: If medical providers are insulated from culpability, the post notes, there is no incentive to correct their conduct.
Mara: What these posts keep returning to is the gap between rights as written and rights as enforced — in the hospital, in the sheriff’s office, in the courthouse.
Pip: The strange thing about this case is that everyone seems to be arguing about the rules of the game while the central allegation is that the rules protecting the patient were never followed. Whether the courts will ever get to that question remains to be seen.
Pulaski County Sheriff Waits a Week to Serve UAMS Doctors—Then Claims It’s Too Late
The Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office took $50 per each of three defendants – all UAMS medical providers accused of criminal false imprisonment and battery – then did not attempt service for over a week, waiting until service of summons would be too late.
The summonses and complaints against Dr. Elizabeth Brown, Dr. Mary “Katie” Kimbrough, and Speech-Language Pathologist Emily Gray were received in the sheriff’s office on April 30, 2026 at 9:33 a.m.
The representative who processed the intake did not warn the plaintiff, me, that there would be a delay. If she had, the plaintiff would have hired a private process server.
The final day for the summonses to be served without leave of the court for an extension was May 7, 2026. A motion for the extension was pending. On May 12, 2026, the Honorable Cara Connors issued an order denying the extension but adding that a timely motion may still be filed if the good cause was documented with more specificity.
On May 28th, three notices by Deputy Joseph Shackleford were filed with the court. He wrote exactly the same thing on each, except changing the defendant’s name.
“*unable to serve in time for court*” signed on May 22, 2026.
WARNING! Are you thinking “I heard housing in Arkansas is cheap and there is a lot of natural beauty. Should I move there?”
Answer: Only if you don’t mind being falsely imprisoned, battered for weeks, and then billed by an aggressive debt collector for over a hundred thousand dollars. This is a very real scenario in Arkansas.
“Nanny, Nanny, You Can’t Catch Us” – UAMS Doctors
Arkansas law supposedly gives competent adults the right to refuse medical treatment—even treatment that doctors believe could save their lives. Supposedly, if a patient refuses treatment, a physician must obtain legal authority before overriding that decision.
That sounds reassuring on paper.
My son’s experience was different.
According to our allegations and the records produced in litigation, Sean Lynn was restrained, heavily sedated, and billed more than $100,000 by UAMS despite his refusal of treatment.
When Sean attempted to pursue civil remedies, the response was not an examination of whether his rights had been violated. Instead, defendants sought dismissal based on technical objections to the summons. Ironically, I located a UAMS collection case using the same summons language defendants claimed was defective in Sean’s case. In another recently filed UAMS case, the summons language differed substantially from the Arkansas Supreme Court’s approved form.
Readers can draw their own conclusions.
What I have learned is that rights written in statutes and rights enforced in practice are not always the same thing. A right that can be ignored without consequence is not much of a right at all.
Criminal prosecutions of state-employed physicians appear to be extraordinarily rare. Civil claims face procedural hurdles that often prevent courts from ever reaching the merits. Meanwhile, the bills continue to arrive.
If you have had a similar experience and would like to share your story, contact me at bohemian_books@yahoo.com.
VERBATIM BRIEF THAT CAN BE DOWNLOADED ABOVE
Plaintiffs’ Brief in Support of Joint Opposition to Jennings R. Boyette and Sriram Navuluri’s Motion to Dismiss Each Plaintiffs’ Claims
Co-Plaintiffs Sean Lynn (“Sean”)[1] and Laura Hammett (“Laura”) joined on a complaint pursuant to Ark. R. Civ. P. 20. Their claims arise from the same two-week-long continuous transaction or occurrence and share a common nucleus of both fact and law.
Separate defendants Jennings R. Boyette and Sriram Navuluri moved the Court to dismiss all claims against them, and to make the dismissal of Sean’s claims with prejudice.
The motion to dismiss is premature because the plaintiffs’ refiled extension motion is pending per the Court’s own invitation; any dismissal must be without prejudice because Sean Lynn’s § 1983 claims—not yet asserted in any proceeding—carry a three-year statute of limitations that has not expired. The caselaw strongly supports denial of the motion, or in the alternative, dismissal without prejudice only.
- The Motion to Dismiss Is Premature While the Plaintiffs’ Refiled Extension Motion Is Pending.
Under Arkansas Rule of Civil Procedure 4(i), service must be accomplished within 120 days of filing the complaint, but a plaintiff may move within that period to extend time upon a showing of good cause. Henyan v. Peek, 359 Ark. 486, 199 S.W.3d 51 (2004). Critically, the Court’s May 12, 2026 Order expressly authorized the plaintiffs to refile their timely filed extension motion with greater specificity, and plaintiffs did so on May 19, 2026—within seven days, well inside any reasonable reading of the Court’s invitation.
Boyette and Navuluri filed their motion to dismiss while that refiled motion remained pending and undecided. The Court should rule on the extension motion first. A motion to dismiss predicated on a service defect that is the subject of a pending and court-authorized motion for extension is simply premature. As Henyan makes clear, the circuit court has authority and jurisdiction to act on a timely extension motion; that authority should be exercised before entertaining dismissal. Henyan, 359 Ark. at 491, 199 S.W.3d at 53. The Henyan Court found a lack of any cause shown in the first three untimely motions, and a poor excuse offered after the motions were filed. Id. The plaintiff is not required to “get an extension of time from this Court” in 120 days. It is required that a motion be made; the Court then has discretion to entertain an amendment.
Furthermore, Hawkins-Luckett v. Crossett Health Foundation, 2024 Ark. App. 539 (2024) illustrates by contrast that courts examine the sufficiency of good-cause showings in extension motions on their merits—a process that cannot occur if a motion to dismiss is granted before the extension motion is resolved. Defendants’ tactic of moving to dismiss while the extension motion is pending, without even acknowledging the Court’s May 12 Order permitting refiling, should be viewed unfavorably by the Court.
- Any Dismissal Must Be Without Prejudice Because Sean Lynn’s § 1983 Statute of Limitations Has Not Expired.
Arkansas Rule of Civil Procedure 4(i)(1) mandates that dismissal for failure to timely serve is without prejudice. The sole recognized exception—where dismissal without prejudice operates effectively as dismissal with prejudice—arises only when all applicable limitations periods have already run so that refiling is impossible. McCue v. Dominguez, 2022 Ark. App. 332, 13, 53 S.W.3d 372, 380. That exception does not apply here.
Sean Lynn’s potential § 1983 claims against Boyette and Navuluri have never been asserted in any proceeding. They arise from the same underlying conduct as the medical negligence claims but are governed by Arkansas’s three-year personal injury statute of limitations, which the Eighth Circuit has consistently applied to § 1983 claims in Arkansas. Hill v. Reyes, 344 Fed.Appx. 291 (2009). A deprivation of constitutional rights is significantly different from and more serious than a violation of a state right, such as the right to be free from medical injury, and therefore deserves a different remedy even though the same act may constitute both a state tort and the deprivation of a constitutional right. Glasscoe v. Howell, 431 F.2d 863, 865 (8th Cir. 1970).
Because those claims have not yet been filed and the three-year period has not expired, there is no basis for dismissal with prejudice. Defendants’ request that medical negligence claims be dismissed with prejudice cannot be bootstrapped into preclusion of the § 1983 claims, which are legally distinct, governed by a different limitations period, and have never been litigated.
In McCoy, cited by Boyette and Navuluri, The Friday Firm represented the UAMS doctor defendants, including a defendant in this case, Dr. Mary Katherine Kimbrough. Associate General Counsel Sherri Robinson represented the nurse defendants. McCoy v. Robertson, 2018 Ark. App. 279, 550 S.W.3d 133. McCoy is differentiated from this case because McCoy alleged run-of-the-mill medical negligence resulting in paralysis. McCoy, 2018 Ark. App. 279, 1, 550 S.W.3d 33, 34. There were no allegations of false imprisonment or exposing the captives genitals with no articulated reason. See id. McCoy did not have a viable claim for deprivation of rights, as Sean has.
Further, all the McCoy doctors were able to establish insufficient service of summons. See id. In fact, one defendant’s certified mailing was signed for by a third party, invalidating it. Id., at 16. This indicates that service on Dr. Natalie J. Applebaum in this case should probably be attempted again, even though her certified mail was signed for by a third party. Br. in supp. of mot. for an extension of time to serve summonses at 3 (differentiated though because McCoy mailed the defendant’s process to his work, instead of a home address as Sean and Laura used for Natalie J. Applebaum).
Also, Boyette and Navuluri informed the Court that “no extension of service time was ever granted” in McCoy. Boyette/Navuluri Br. in Supp. Mot. Dismiss, at 3. What they left out is that McCoy never filed a motion for extension of time to serve. He claimed that he thought service was proper, based on speaking with UAMS associate general counsel Robinson, who confirmed she had received the service packets for all the defendants, including the doctors. McCoy, 2018 Ark. App. at 5, 550 S.W.3d at 36.
- The Court Detests an Absurdity, Such As Granting a Motion to Dismiss Claims of Confinement Without Due Process Based on an Unartfully Written Motion.
The defendants’ own zealous use of procedural process—filing this motion while ignoring the Court’s May 12 Order—is relevant context. This conduct is admissible as evidence in future proceedings that Boyette and Navuluri were fully aware of their own procedural rights while denying due process protections to Sean Lynn under Ark. Code Ann. §§ 20-9-604, 20-47-207, 20-47-209(a)(1), 20-47-210, 20-47-211, and 20-47-220.
Wherefore the plaintiffs ask that Jennings R. Boyette and Sriram Navuluri’s motion to dismiss be denied, or if granted, that all claims are dismissed without prejudice. The plaintiff pray that whether their civil claims are dismissed or not, that this Honorable Court will refer the allegations of criminal false imprisonment by Dr. Boyette and Dr. Navuluri to an appropriate prosecutorial agency.
Respectfully Submitted,
[1] Common names are used because UAMS employees wrote versions of Laura Lynn in the medical report, and using “Lynn” may be confusing.
Podcast Episode: UAMS Medical Center Controversies
Pip: When a hospital's legal team argues that keeping track of sponges inside a human body is simply not the surgeon's problem, you know you're somewhere interesting.
Mara: This episode covers recent posts on A Higher Law by LauraLynnHammett — medical negligence, a textbook clash over surgical accountability, and a case of forced treatment where no judge and no counsel were ever involved. Let's start with the sponge.
The Surgeon's Duty and the Blame That Travels Downhill
Mara: The central question here is whether a surgeon can hand off responsibility for counting surgical sponges to a nurse — and what happens when that argument meets a first-year torts textbook.
Pip: The brief filed by lawyers for UAMS physicians Joseph Margolick and Natalie Applebaum makes the position explicit: "The standard of care does not require the physician-defendants to actually count and confirm the number of sponges used during Mr. Wesson's surgery. That is the RN circulator's responsibility."
Mara: So the upshot is that a sponge left inside a patient becomes the nurse's legal problem, not the surgeon's — which is precisely the argument the defense is running in a motion for summary judgment.
Pip: Except that argument runs straight into a wall. Thompson v. Baptist Memorial Hospital, a Mississippi Supreme Court case from 2018, is cited directly in the post alongside Prosser, Wade and Schwartz's Torts, fifteenth edition — the same textbook used at the UAMS-affiliated law school. The case holds that a surgeon's duty to account for all sponges is nondelegable. You can assign the task; you cannot assign the legal duty.
Mara: That tension — between what the defense brief claims and what a standard torts text says — is the spine of the post titled Dr. Margolick and the Textbook Case of Negligence. The author is a co-plaintiff in a related case against the same physicians, writing as a first-year law student, not as counsel.
Pip: Which makes the textbook citation feel less like a footnote and more like a pointed homework assignment turned in publicly.
Mara: The post also notes that the complaint names the nurses and patient care technicians alleged to be culpable alongside the physicians. The finger-pointing the defense brief invites appears to be going in multiple directions at once.
Pip: The sponge accountability question turns out to be the tidier half of what's alleged at UAMS. The other half involves what happened to a patient who refused treatment entirely.
When Refusal Becomes Confinement
Mara: A post titled Arkansas denied counsel before imprisoning a TBI patient lays out what happened when a traumatic brain injury patient at UAMS refused treatment — and the medical team proceeded anyway, for two weeks, without a judge or appointed counsel.
Pip: The post documents a cocktail of sedating drugs administered across the first twenty-three hours, including fentanyl, lorazepam, haloperidol, dexmedetomidine, and olanzapine — while staff claimed the patient's impaired speech had no pharmaceutical explanation.
Mara: The required petition under Arkansas Code Annotated Section 20-47-207 was never filed. No judicial oversight, no counsel. A second post, Producer Wanted, notes that video and documentary evidence exists and that the UAMS Police Department declined to receive it.
Pip: The author negotiated the patient's release after two weeks. Arkansas is now spending considerably more on litigation than the hundred and fifty dollars the statute sets as the fee for patient counsel.
Mara: Nondelegable duties, undocumented drug orders, a missing petition — the throughline is accountability that gets passed around until it lands nowhere.
Pip: Until someone starts citing the textbook. More from A Higher Law next time.
Podcast Episode: Family Court Corruption And Custody Battles
Pip: There's a particular kind of irony in a system built to protect children that ends up being the thing children need protecting from — and A Higher Law has been documenting exactly that.
Mara: This episode covers work by LauraLynnHammett across two connected territories: alleged corruption in the family courts, centered on a minor's counsel named William Spiller Jr., and what happens to ordinary parents once the support bureaucracy gets its hands on a case.
Pip: Let's start with the history behind Spiller's rise — and what that history makes his alleged conduct so hard to look away from.
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Stanley Mosk, the Spillers, and the Weight of Legacy
Mara: This segment is about a lineage — how a father's fight for racial dignity became the ladder his son climbed into a position of court-appointed power, and what that son is alleged to have done with it.
Pip: The post draws a direct line from William Spiller Sr., who crusaded for Black golfers' right to compete in the PGA, to his son's career as a minor's counsel. The Los Angeles Times account of the elder Spiller captures what that exclusion cost him: "Decades after golf tournaments threw him out because he was black, Spiller would jolt awake, sit up in his bed, shout the names of the long-deceased people who ran those tournaments. Sometimes he would grab his gun, stalk into the living room, wave the pistol, promise 3 a.m. revenge."
Mara: That's a man whose wound never closed. The post's argument is that his son inherited the access that wound eventually unlocked — Stanley Mosk's civil rights work with Spiller Sr. opened doors in Los Angeles legal circles — but did not inherit the cause.
Pip: Junior became, by the post's account, the go-to attorney for judges who had already picked a winner in custody disputes. The post describes his victims as predominantly Black women, and names specific cases: Tanisha Foster, whose daughter was conceived with the late rapper Nipsey Hussle; Donicia Augustus; Maria Chiarello. The throughline is money — appointed minor's counsel fees, largely taxpayer-funded, with minimal oversight.
Mara: The post puts it plainly: "The judges are the slave owners in the scenario of these unjust family law rulings. William Spiller is an overseer." That framing is deliberate and pointed.
Pip: A guest post flags a federal case against Spiller and Los Angeles County — dismissed in what the Post Modern Justice Media Project calls a "blatantly corrupt ruling." The corruption alleged isn't just individual misconduct; it's a system that then honored Spiller as a keynote speaker at a conference on cultural competency in family law.
Mara: Which brings us to what the families caught in that system actually face once the support machinery takes over.
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When the Support System Becomes the Trap
Mara: This segment is about what happens to a parent after the court decides — not just who wins custody, but how the financial apparatus then operates on the losing side, sometimes for decades.
Pip: The post introduces a composite figure called "Sam" — a licensed schoolteacher, church-going, described as genuinely good with young people — who was given essentially no contact with her own child across an eighteen-year family law case. Here is the financial picture the post lays out: "Sam is supposed to pay the ex $100,000 in child support arrears. Sam is not allowed to have a passport. There is a threat of losing Sam's teaching credentials. There is a threat of losing Sam's driver's license."
Mara: So the upshot is a parent who cannot travel, cannot work in her profession, and has money seized from her bank account and paychecks — while the ex earns over a hundred thousand dollars a year from a government job.
Pip: Sam connected with this reporting specifically because she had been investigating Spiller — which puts both segments in direct conversation. The post's closing question is blunt: once a parent tries to leave a relationship, bureaucrats including judges and DCSS workers claim authority over the child's best interests, take a percentage for themselves and their associates, and ask whether any of this actually serves the child. The answer the post offers is: not a chance.
Mara: The pattern across both segments is the same — a structure that looks like protection but functions as extraction, and the people inside it rarely have the standing to say so.
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Pip: A father haunted by golf tournaments. A son appointed to protect children. A teacher who can't renew her passport. The thread connecting all of it is who gets to define justice and who pays for the definition.
Mara: Next time, we'll see what else A Higher Law is watching.
UAMS Math: Immunity = Entitlement
UAMS knows that over 71 of its employees forced a man to take several sedating and pain relief medicines, including fentanyl, against his will. UAMS knows the employees bound him to the bed to prevent him from leaving with his mother – me.
In response to a pro se lawsuit (which we would be happy to turn over to counsel on contingency), the Board of Trustees of the University of Arkansas Counsel Sherri Robinson is claiming that the employees have immunity from civil suit.
The University does not explain why the UAMS PD has not filed criminal charges on any of the participants. Fifty-two of the batterers are still employed by UAMS.
This is why we think Nurse Shannon Cobb (or any of the defendants) should not be dismissed:
A Higher Law 