Podcast Episode: It ain’t legal, just because doctors get away with it.
Pip: There's a legal principle so obvious it shouldn't need saying — and yet here we are, needing to say it.
Mara: This episode covers work from LauraLynnHammett, walking the line between constitutional law school and a live medical-detention case. The territory is separation of powers, what courts actually enforce, and what the law requires even when nobody's watching. Let's start with the core argument: getting away with something isn't the same as it being legal.
It ain't legal, just because doctors get away with it.
Pip: The question this post is really asking is whether a court judgment — or the absence of one — is what makes conduct illegal. Because if the answer is yes, then enforcement is the whole of the law, and that's a very different country than the one the Constitution describes.
Mara: The post draws the line plainly. Here's the direct statement: "If the courts don't enforce the law for whatever reason, then it's still the law. And a person or entity that violates that law still violates that law. It doesn't take a proclamation of the court to make the violation a violation."
Pip: So the upshot is that impunity and legality are two separate columns. A court's silence doesn't move conduct from one to the other. That distinction matters enormously when the people violating the law have expensive attorneys and the person harmed is filing pro se.
Mara: The post gets concrete fast. The case involves a patient held at UAMS — the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences — against his will, restrained with four-point restraints after being injected with fentanyl. The medical record runs 1,300 pages and contains no notation of who physically held down a 220-pound, six-foot construction worker.
Pip: No notation. In an emergency room with surveillance cameras. That's not an oversight — that's a gap shaped exactly like accountability.
Mara: The post lists the drugs administered — fentanyl, lorazepam, diazepam, Haldol, Seroquel, Precedex, propranolol — and notes that propranolol requires a gradual wean, not a cold stop. The patient also suffered a dislocated ossicular chain, leaving him functionally hard of hearing. A $46,000 bill arrived at his home after discharge.
Pip: And the legal argument anchoring all of this is the Fourth Amendment — the right to be secure in your person, free from seizure without probable cause. UAMS is a state institution, which means its staff are state actors, and state actors are bound by that amendment whether a judge ever rules on it or not.
Mara: The post is also candid about procedural setbacks — a filing saved instead of submitted the night before a trip, a judge striking the opposition without stated rationale. The honest admission is that the doctors may escape on procedural grounds. But the post holds that this outcome would not retroactively legalize what happened.
Pip: Getting away with it and being innocent of it — those have never been the same thing, and constitutional law school, apparently, is a good place to sharpen that distinction.
Mara: The closing ask is practical: if you know a federal attorney licensed in Arkansas, leave contact information in the comments.
Pip: The law exists whether or not anyone enforces it. That's either reassuring or terrifying, depending on which side of it you're standing on.
Mara: Next time, we'll see where that argument goes — in the classroom and in the courtroom.
It ain’t legal, just because doctors get away with it.
Good morning. I’m here at Bowen School of Law. I get here early so that I don’t have to deal with traffic, but I come across the street, and we’re going to call this Day Two of our physical health journey, Round Two.
I’m taking a walk. Hopefully, you’ll maybe pause the video and go get some shoes on and go out and take a walk, too.
I should start doing these live. I don’t know if I can do them live on my phone, but I think my son does. He’s at Peckerwood23; that’s his channel, and he’s kind of an interesting guy. You might find something fun to watch on that.
But since I’m not live, I’m going to have to talk about something—a one-sided conversation—and hopefully you’ll put some comments down below, and I could talk about those and answer questions or respond to your comments at a later time.
But for now, I’m going to talk about the separation of powers. That’s what we’re studying in constitutional law. This is the first semester, and I don’t know—maybe I’ve been here—it was August 24th was the first day of classes, so now it’s what, September something? I’m losing track already. I think maybe we’re about three weeks into it.
We’ve been talking about the United States Constitution. Who would have ever suspected in a class on constitutional law?
So, the first thing I want to say is: read it. It really only takes maybe two hours, and you could find copies on the internet. I put a link to, or I put one of the channels on one of my playlists about law lectures. It’s worth a listen, and that’s just someone reading the entire Constitution. It takes maybe an hour and ten minutes to read it out loud.
You know, I never read the Bible until I was like 40 years old. I’m 64 now. And so, when I finally read it, I’m like, “Wow, there’s so much that comes out of it that you, you know, like a person who hasn’t grown up in the church or has read the Bible, New or Old Testament, or, like me, I had gone to a Jewish camp when I was young, and I’m a Christian now, but I was for a long time from a secular Jewish family, and I loved going to this Jewish camp. So my parents let me go, and we were praying in Hebrew.
So I didn’t even know what I was saying. We were singing in Hebrew. So I’ll sing you a song. This is in Hebrew.
Well, and they—you could sing the same words in a bunch of different melodies.
I’m going to change the view here so you can see what I see because it’s very cool.
So, there are a whole mess of geese. I don’t know if geese are ducks. I think they’re geese because they have kind of longish necks.
Well, okay, that’s it. Maybe you’ll see them when I walk past.
So I used to pray in Hebrew, not even knowing what I was saying. And then when I read the Bible, I learned that that’s a psalm, and it says, “Blessed are the brothers who live together as one or in unity.”
And so what I’m telling you is: go out and read the Constitution of the United States. It’s so interesting to know how our government is supposed to run.
And one of the big issues is the separation of powers. So the first three articles are—the first one sets up Congress. That’s the Senate and the House of Representatives. And it gives them their powers, which—I think they’re doing okay.
The second article is the presidency, the executive branch, and I’d say that Congress holds the purse strings and the executive branch holds the sword.
So what does the third branch, the judiciary, do? And this is all federal. The states also usually set up the system very similar to the federal system, but they’re kind of like a vertical separation of powers, where the three branches are like a horizontal separation of powers.
And so why I’m talking about this today is because the judiciary is only supposed to enforce the laws that Congress has made and that the president has not vetoed and had Congress come back with a two-thirds vote to overturn it. And I don’t know if that’s in both houses or if that’s—anyways, I know that there’s a two-thirds. I think it might only be the Senate that has to do that. I’ll have to look that up before my first exam.
So the courts are really there to enforce law. And if the courts don’t enforce the law for whatever reason, then it’s still the law. And a person or entity that violates that law still violates that law.
It doesn’t take a proclamation of the court to make the violation a violation.
It’s like if a husband cheats on his wife. I don’t think—I had a boyfriend that used to cheat on me. Does he cheat on his wife even if she doesn’t catch him? Does he cheat on his wife even if she doesn’t go to court for divorce and have a judge say, “I’m giving her a divorce based upon infidelity of the husband”?
No, he cheated on her. It’s done. He’s a cheat. He’s an infidel.
Well, the same thing happens every day with big businesses and powerful people who have the money to pay for attorneys who are schmoozy with the judges, who have studied law and know all the rules and are going up against people who may not have representation because they don’t have money. And no lawyer wants to take the case on contingency because, you know, for one thing, he knows he’s going to go up against these big attorneys, and it’s going to cost a fortune, and then you may lose anyways even if you have the best case and you argue it properly.
That’s happened to me before.
I lost a case against a debt collection company, Portfolio Recovery Associates, and they were 100% wrong, and they lied, and I could prove that they were lying. And the judge, Lee P. Rudowski, he would just—like, he lied, and he admitted to one of the lies but then didn’t call it a lie. He said, like, “Oh, Laura’s right.” You know, we accidentally changed a quote in quotation marks of what she said by dropping off the important half of the sentence that changes its meaning completely.
Sort of like taking out the word “not” and then putting it in quotations.
And so, you know, sometimes you’re just up against a corrupt judge. And unfortunately, very often that’s the case now. And that’s kind of why I’m on this subject because, like, right now I’m in a case against doctors at UAMS.
So they don’t like being lumped together as the defendants. They want me to say individually what each one did. Like, Dr. Damalcheruvu said, “We will keep this patient who is refusing treatment.”
And then other doctors and nurses, like nurse Nathan Ernst, shot fentanyl into the patient so that he would be immobilized. I mean, it was a pretty strong dose, too. It was enough to knock someone out.
I don’t think it knocked him out because the patient was then restrained to the bed railings with four-point restraints by some unnamed people, even though it was in the emergency room, which has surveillance cameras.
There is no notation in the 1,300-page medical record as to who physically held down this 220-pound, 6-foot-tall construction worker.
So it was probably more like three or four people.
And I did observe later, in the two weeks of terror that the doctors and nurses at UAMS caused, I did see three, four, maybe more of the doctors and nurses and undisclosed people. Maybe they were with the security team, but they were all tackling him, chasing him down hallways as he tried to escape.
And then they sent a bill once I got him out against medical advice by threatening a lawsuit. And they went and talked to their legal team, and they talked to the police and found out that the police department is not allowed to stop the man from leaving.
Though apparently they thought it was okay to not help him leave. But they’re wrong about that. There’s case law, and I’ll go into that another time.
But anyways, these doctors and nurses sent a bill for $46,000 to his home after he got out.
While he was there, they dislocated the ossicular chain in his left ear so that he’s now practically deaf.
He still hears, but he says it sounds like everybody’s mumbling, and he has to read lips and say, “What? What?” And it’s impossible to get his attention if you’re behind him. You have to go up and tap him on the shoulder.
So his alarm doesn’t work for him. He can’t differentiate the alarm from just the noises that you’re hearing in the background here. It all sounds the same to him. So he’s not sure if it’s street noise or the alarm.
So they did that. They starved and dehydrated him and gave him just a huge list of drugs, like fentanyl, lorazepam, diazepam, Haldol, Seroquel, Precedex, propranolol, which you aren’t allowed to stop cold turkey. You have to wean off of it, or possible death, I guess.
The generic for Keppra, for anti-seizure, which is something that he would have considered using. But it’s not mandatory that you use it. And I don’t think—I don’t think he would have decided to use it because he didn’t feel bad.
So they had just made up this whole, like, urgent-care need or this ICU, intensive-care need, that didn’t exist.
But it sure was good for their pocketbooks, helping to generate income for UAMS to pay its employees.
There are doctors like Joseph Margolick. I think he’s making like over $500,000 a year. Can you imagine? That’s like most people in ten years.
And he’s got an outstanding warrant against him, by the way, but he’s still practicing medicine against unwilling patients at UAMS.
So, the reason why I’m talking about all this—I’m going to go back towards school now—the reason that I’m talking about all this is that they might get away with it because I’m making mistakes.
My son can’t do any of the paperwork.
He’s like, “Oh, they gave him aphasia, too,” which is loss of his vocabulary.
So, for the last two years, he’s been trying to build his vocabulary back up. But he talks really slowly. If you think I talk slow, you should listen to him. And he has to think about every word.
And he doesn’t have internet for some reason. I don’t know how he does his YouTube channel. He goes and uses somebody else’s internet to upload.
But anyways, these—Dr. Margolick, Britney Beumeler, who’s a nurse, Dr. Damalcheruvu, Dr. Elizabeth Brown, who is a resident, who is like, “Do not go to Dr. Elizabeth Brown for orthopedics.” Oh, no. This woman, she should be in jail. She literally should be in jail at this moment for having committed the crimes of false imprisonment.
And so anyways, these people are going to probably get away with it on procedural issues, such as I sent Dr. Damalcheruvu his summons and complaint, but he did not accept it from the post office until it was past the time that I was allowed to serve. So now he’s using that as an excuse to try to get the case dismissed.
And then I wrote an opposition to his motion to dismiss.
And I finished at like 11:30 at night the day before I left to go visit my son in Las Vegas, where he had no internet. At least he didn’t have internet at his house. Maybe he did have internet. But anyways, I wasn’t going to have my computer. I know that. And I wanted to take a break from typing because my fingers have osteoarthritis and I was in extreme pain.
So anyways, I was going to visit my son, and at 11:30 at night, I hit save instead of send, and okay.
So apparently because the document got saved rather than into the queue, and I didn’t know that until it was also too late, Judge Connors decided that they should not only strike our response but strike the letter that explains why that happened.
So I don’t know how she can possibly rationalize that. She didn’t give any rationale. She just said, “Okay, I’m going to give them—I’m going to give Dr. Damalcheruvu what he’s asking for, which is to strike everything that was filed regarding that opposition.”
So it was as if the opposition never existed.
So now let’s say that the doctors get away with it in court, like there’s never any court case. And I’m not saying that’s going to happen because there’s more ways than one to skin a cat, and I’m going to try them all. But let’s say that I fail.
And does that mean that it’s okay for one human to drug another human against his will and then tie him up naked and starve him and dehydrate him and stick catheters up his genitals and punch him in the ear when he doesn’t obey?
No. There’s this little pesky thing called the Fourth Amendment, where a person is supposed to be secure in their person, and they’re not supposed to be seized without a reasonable cause to issue a warrant.
Probable cause. That’s another one I’ve got to look up and make sure I get the words exactly right for the test.
But you get the gist.
So the point is that just because you get away with something in terms of a judgment from a court does not mean that what you did is not illegal. It does not mean that you complied with the law.
It does not mean that you complied with the statutes that say that doctors have to petition a court for permission to keep a patient who is refusing treatment.
And it does not mean that doctors don’t have to comply if they’re state actors, which people at UAMS—the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences—they are state actors, and state actors must comply with the Fourth Amendment.
So, hey, if anyone out there knows an attorney who can work in the federal court in Arkansas, give me a note in the comments with a phone number to call or text, or whatever, however you want me to contact them, because we would love to have a professional on this.
Thank you.