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'Callous' surgeon faces extradition to Australia after arrest in US
Conviction on charges including manslaughter could entail three life terms.
- AP
- Published: 00:48 March 13, 2008
- Dr Jayant Patel is accused of leaving a bloody trail of mistakes as a surgeon, now resulting in manslaughter charges.
- Image Credit: AP
Portland, Oregon: First New York, then Oregon, and now Australia. Dr Jayant Patel is accused of leaving a bloody trail of mistakes as a surgeon, now resulting in manslaughter charges.
His arrest at his Portland home on Tuesday set the legal clock ticking on an extradition request by Australia, where he was director of surgery at Bundaberg Base Hospital in Queensland from 2003 to 2005.
Patel made a brief appearance on Tuesday afternoon in US District Court, where a judge scheduled a hearing for this afternoon. His extradition hearing was set for April 10.
The extradition complaint charges Patel under Australian law with three counts of manslaughter, three counts of grievous bodily harm, two counts of negligent acts or omissions causing harm, seven counts of fraud and one count of attempted fraud. If convicted on all counts, Patel could face up to three life terms in prison plus 100 years.
The complaint also said Patel "actively hid his history of professional misconduct and lied repeatedly on forms required for registration in Australia".
In a separate memo filed by the US Attorney's office in Portland, prosecutors said that once he was hired in Australia, "Patel bungled surgeries with tragic results." The list included: failure to stop internal bleeding in one patient who later died; removing a healthy gland from one patient and leaving behind a cancerous gland; tearing one patient's esophagus; and performing unnecessary surgery on patients in poor health when there were less risky alternatives.
Patel trained in New York state at the University of Rochester School of Medicine in the 1980s, where he was cited for failure to examine some patients before operating on them - a failure that "clearly evidenced his moral unfitness to practice medicine", according to the New York Commissioner of Health at the time and had to serve out a three-year disciplinary probation.
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