|
Class Notes: November 5, 1997
CLASS NOTES FEATURES
Both a physician and an attorney be
Goebel says a law degree helps with patient rights
ROBERT H. GOEBEL '68 isn't your garden-variety law- school graduate awaiting the results of the California bar exam, due this month. The 51-year-old graduated as valedictorian of Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego in May, going through as a part-time student in four years while continuing his regular practice as a physician.
Goebel directs the radiation oncology program at Long Beach [California] Community Cancer Center and is a consultant to Scripps Memorial Hospital's radiation oncology unit in San Diego. As he explains it, his interest in a juris doctor is hardly the result of degree-itis. He says he become convinced that a law degree would be tremendously valuable in fighting for the rights of patients at a time when cost-conscious health-maintenance organizations (HMOs) have come to dominate American health care.
An interesting byproduct of Goebel's legal studies was an examination of case law involving oncology topics like breast and lung cancers. He was looking to test the hypothesis that if doctors--"the docs," in his verbal shorthand--had good practice guidelines in place, their risk of losing malpractice cases would fall. He enlisted his son, Michael, a 22-year-old molecular biologist at the University of Nevada, to help produce a study based on an examination of 119 malpractice suits in California brought by breast cancer patients against their oncologists. Presented at a breast cancer conference in San Antonio last spring, the study supported his hunch.
"I think there is very good circumstantial evidence that if you have good guidelines, you can cut your litigation risk," Goebel says. "I don't believe this had really had been done before. I was in the right place at the right time, and I asked the right questions." Shortly afterward, he presented findings from a corollary study, also done with his son, on the use of family histories to cut physicians' legal exposure.
Not that Goebel is a reflexive defender of physicians. "I've consulted on cases where the docs were too busy and made mistakes." He adds that "in a managed-care setting, primary-care physicians are often seeing too many patients too fast, and they may triage patients inappropriately."
Goebel, who has been practicing in California since 1979, got his degree from the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in 1973 after first flirting with a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard, where he went after graduating from Princeton with a degree in astrophysics. At Old Nassau, he recalls a tiny major with about four or five people--but "intimate contact with eminent minds" like John Wheeler, who taught relativity, and Lyman Spitzer *38.
Looking ahead, Goebel sees "a lot of issues brought about by rationing" of care by HMOs, and a need for someone with both a medical and legal background to deal with "tricky decisions." And "if medicine becomes too managed care-heavy, I might decide go into administration, as the CEO of a hospital or even working for the government."
--Jeffrey Marshall '71
Beth Wilkinson '84 helped prosecute Timothy McVeigh
WHEN PAW last reported on prosecutor Beth Wilkinson '84 (November 8, 1995), she and her senior colleague Cheryl Pollak '75 had won a precedent-setting case against a Colombian narco-terrorist in Brooklyn. Wilkinson then moved to the Justice Department, where she became deputy chief of terrorism and violent crime. Following the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, she helped Attorney General Janet Reno interview candidates to become the lead prosecutor in the government's case against Timothy McVeigh and his alleged coconspirator, Terry Nichols. Joe Hartzler, a veteran prosecutor, won the job. One day, out of the blue, he called Wilkinson and asked her to join his team.
"I had no doubts I wanted to do it," Wilkinson said in July while preparing for Nichols's trial. The McVeigh trial was behind her, and she seemed relaxed as she drank tea at an outdoor cafˇ in downtown Denver. A beeper at her waist linked her to the government command post in a nearby hotel where she has worked since April 1996.
"Like so many, I was shocked by the bombing," she said. "I couldn't believe it had happened here in the USA, or that two Americans would do this to their own people. I wanted to represent not just the victims, but everyone in the country who was horrified.
"The FBI," she added, "found tons of evidence"--everything from explosive residue to truck parts to handwriting. Wilkinson, who took charge of forensics, interviewed experts the world over to learn about explosives. "We had a McDonald's video showing McVeigh in Junction City, Kansas, on April 17, just before he rented the bomb truck there. On the day of the bombing, he was arrested 75 miles outside Oklahoma City--what was he doing driving out of that city on that day? He had bomb residue on his shirt, and ear plugs in his pocket." Agents later found letters to his sister and friends "filled with evidence of motivation," she said.
"It's still hard to grasp why he did it. The only time he showed any real emotion in court was when one of his Army buddies talked about the Buffalo Bills football team. McVeigh smiled and held up a fist. Anyone who drove a truck up to the front of the Murrah Building would know there was a day-care center there--you can see the windows, the cribs, kids waving to their parents, fingerprint paintings on the windows. He'd read the Turner Diaries, a kind of right-wing manifesto, and knew the impact of the bomb he built."
Wilkinson's interrogation of Jennifer McVeigh, who loved her brother and shared his political philosophy, provided key testimony. "What we wanted," she said, "was full, truthful information about her relationship with her brother. We also wanted her to identify his handwriting so that we could make a positive ID of the note on the getaway car in Oklahoma City. She had given two sworn statements to the FBI. She told me the FBI had scared her. I asked her in court whether the FBI had scared her into lying or into telling the truth and she said telling the truth. I felt compassion for her, for the terrible predicament her brother had put her in. She gave us a note her brother had written six months before the bombing, in which he said he wanted the ATF agents in the Waco action against the Branch Davidians to die swinging in the wind. Some of the agents were from the Oklahoma City office."
The trial, Wilkinson said, "was an amazing effort by thousands of people. We worked night and day, seven days a week--but whenever I started to feel sorry for myself, I'd think, 'When this case is over, I'll get my life back, but the victims never will.' A three-year-old boy lost his grandfather, 'PawPaw,' in the bombing. PawPaw just seemed to have disappeared. The boy wouldn't believe PawPaw was dead and insisted on being shown what was left of his office. For several months, he was afraid someone would bomb his day-care facility; then he went through a phase where he wanted to die to be with his PawPaw in Heaven. Even now, on Paw-Paw's birthday, he sends him messages on helium balloons. Such stories inspired us constantly to work harder."
Wilkinson gave the summation in the death-penalty phase. "The premeditation, the fact that he was a traitor, that he killed civilians--19 children under five--the death penalty was justified. I hope it will provide some deterrent, and it obviously will prevent him from using prison to promote his cause."
When the prosecution team left the courtroom after the verdict, people stood on the street to cheer and applaud. "People don't cheer for trial lawyers, normally," Wilkinson explained, then smiled. "I still get choked up. I felt that in working on the trial, I was following the motto of Princeton in the Nation's Service, as my dad, a member of the Class of 1961, did. He was a nuclear-sub captain. It's been an obligation and a privilege to do my public service this way."
--Dan White '65
|