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.
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