By Thomas B. Scheffey
Connecticut Law Tribune
April 29, 2011
http://www.ctlawtribune.com/getarticle.aspx?ID=40376
Eighty-year-old Dr. Thomas Godar looked distinguished and modest at the same time, using his best bedside manner to build trust with the jury.
He testified last week in the trial of John Doe No. 2, the first of 93 plaintiffs who allege that St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford turned a blind eye as pedophile Dr. George Reardon molested hundreds of child patients in the 1970s and 80s.
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| St. Francis hospital defense lawyers leave Waterbury Complex Litigation courthouse April 28. From left, James Rotondo, Ernest Mattei and Paul Williams. Women are unidentified. |
In this unpredictable courtroom gamble, St. Francis is calling on some of Reardon’s old medical colleagues, elder statesmen of the “Greatest Generation,” to instill a sense of trust and confidence about the hospital. The task of the handsome old men is to convince jurors that Dr. Reardon projected such a magnificently trustworthy image that he fooled everyone—and that St. Francis hospital had no way of knowing he was abusing children.
Godar engaged the jury with his eyes while he was testifying, instead of talking to the defense lawyer questioning him. He joked self-effacingly that he was the “venereal disease officer” for the Air Force in occupied Japan in 1959. But as the trial moved through its third full week last week – it’s scheduled to resume Tuesday -- some of the most important defense testimony focused on photography and research.
Plaintiff’s lawyer Michael Stratton has expressed amazement that Reardon was taking thousands of photos of children in his growth studies and developing them himself, at home. A cache of 50,000 of these images was discovered in 2007 in Reardon’s former West Hartford home, during a remodeling. Reardon died in 1998. The hospital is being sued for failing to detect what he was regularly molesting children in his hospital office.
In the 1970s, St. Francis had three professional photographers on staff and a professional darkroom on the premises. Godar, whose specialty was lungs, relied heavily on X-rays. He was head of the pulmonary department, and his recollections shed light on how Reardon’s activities might have passed for normal.
Day Pitney lawyer Ernest Mattei asked Godar why he had three cameras of his own, why he didn’t use the professional photographers and the hospital’s darkroom facilities. “Two reasons, one my own fault. I was too busy, pushing it,” with tight deadlines for lectures. If he sent a photo job to the hospital lab, it could have a turnaround time of several days. Lecture illustrations were a lower priority than the public relations photos of hospital dignitaries. Also, quality was only fair – a lay photographer shooting detail of an X-ray never seemed to get it quite right.
It was evident that Reardon might not have seemed so terribly odd, buying photo supplies and camera equipment for science.
Godar was also on the hospital’s Research Committee from 1969 to the early 1980’s.
He explained the committee approved expenditures for research equipment, and also approved research study proposals.
“Did Dr. Reardon ever present a protocol for a growth study?” Mattei asked.
“No,” Godar replied.
“Did he ask for money?”
“Yes.”
When asked if he remembered reading 42-year-old Research Committee minutes that were flashed on the courtroom screen, Godar replied, jokingly, “That’s cruel!” before summoning his eyesight and memory to the task.
Curiosity Not Piqued
A six-item memo from the Research Committee announced the purchase of a Leitz Macroprocessor for $6,000 and the green-lighting of a $2,100 lymph flow project. Reardon’s $750 request for photo supplies seemed modest, Godar agreed.
On cross-examination, Stratton asked Godar about an application by the hospital to the American Medical Association that referred to Dr. Reardon’s work as “research.”
“Research is a broad term” with many meanings, Godar answered. He said, for example, a young resident sent to do library work to find out more about a patient’s unusual condition might be considered to be doing research.
Increasingly, Godar’s answers used the term “protocol” to distinguish the kinds of work that the Research Committee would examine, approve or supervise. Such formal projects, the hospital contends, are the only activities that should be covered by written assurances of humanitarian conduct made to the U.S. government. The plaintiffs allege that the hospital broke its promise to conduct research using generally accepted standards of care.
But the hospital, with its current and planned witnesses, is attempting to establish in the jury’s mind that when it says “research,” that term only applies to drug-testing studies and large, heavily-monitored experiments. Reardon’s work, it hopes to establish, shouldn’t have triggered in-house supervision or come under the standards of care spelled out in the federal assurances.
When Stratton asked Godar if his research committee ever took an interest in examining Reardon’s growth studies on young children, Godar replied, “Not to my knowledge. Accumulation of data and research are not the same,” he added.
Godar may have also scored points when he explained that there were fewer medical specializations 40 years ago. Reardon worked with children, without being a pediatrician or a pediatric gland doctor. Godar, too, worked with children from time to time, without being a pediatric lung doctor
Whenever Godar was allowed to speak at length about medicine, he could establish himself as likeable. He talked about how some doctors can be brittle academic scientists, without the human touch, while others can coax out of a patient the real reasons for their visit – a health concern the patient was reluctant to express. Godar seemed to be describing himself.
Stratton, perhaps not wanting to irritate the jury, held his fire when he could have objected.
The defense team seldom does this. Mattei objected repeatedly over relevance when Stratton was attempting to show key document language to Godar about hospital assurances of research project “surveillance.” Mattei, aware of the effect the objections could have, almost apologized to the jury at one point.
A professional trial analyst, not present at last week’s testimony, commented: “Jurors take their job seriously, and they’re curious – they don’t like too many objections, they don’t like people keeping information from them.”
No Effect?
The hospital’s first expert witness on damages, Harvard psychiatrist Martin Kelly, put Stratton’s polite waiting game to a test. Kelly, at a rate of $550 an hour, reviewed all of plaintiff John Doe No. 2’s educational and medical records, and interviewed his relatives, former girlfriends and ex-wife.
Kelly, questioned by defense attorney James Rotondo, explained his specialty of forensic psychology – criminal and civil legal work. Rotondo got the “hired gun” question out of the way early, and Kelly said he had done 55 to 60 hours of work, for about $30,000. Kelly said he had also reviewed the files of three therapists Doe consulted over the years.
John Doe No. 2, who claims he was molested repeatedly by Reardon between his grade school and high school years, knew Kelly was the expert witness for the hospital. During their conversations, Kelly said it was hard to get Doe to relax. “It was kind of a taffy pull,” said Kelly, a round man in his 70s.
Kelly viewed Doe’s elementary school grades, and concluded that meeting Reardon when he was in fourth grade had no noticeable negative effect on his grades. Kelly said children can have severe, medium or minimal psychiatric damage from childhood sexual abuse. He said he thought the relationship Doe had with Reardon was not particularly harmful.
After Doe became angry with his father, a firefighter, for having an affair with a next-door neighbor, Reardon became sort of a father figure to the boy, the expert witness said. Doe, his brother, and Reardon’s two adopted sons regularly took summer vacations to a cabin near Lake Placid, N.Y. There the plaintiff claims he was subjected to Reardon “treatments,” like the in-office masturbation the doctor performed.
Kelly suggested that the father’s affair had a more negative impact than Reardon’s conduct. While Kelly painted Doe as a man who was “witty, warm, fun-loving, caring and not a worrier” when he began a relationship with a woman, he would later become sullen, silent, or angry, as the relationship grew older.
On cross-examination, Stratton could scarcely contain his indignation. He took out a marker and began writing on blank newsprint on an easel. During the plaintiff’s case, Yale child psychologist Steven Marans, a PhD at the child study center, testified that child sexual abuse can have the effect of an emotional grenade in a child’s development.
Stratton began to list the symptoms Marans and child sex abuse specialists say result from this type of victimization. Distracted thinking? Hopelessness? Depression? Impulse control problems? Substance abuse? Thoughts of suicide? Stratton wrote the terms on his easel-mounted paper as Kelly, sometimes with reservations, agreed these are well-established symptoms of child sex abuse.
Then Stratton turned to Doe’s results on an evaluation tool called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2. Kelly, who had ordered the test, had not previously referred to, or quoted from, this computer-generated analysis of Doe’s answers.
Reading through the pages of the report, Stratton placed a check by each of the list of classic symptoms. Kelly didn’t fight back. Neither did the St. Francis lawyers, for the moment. In the category of Doe’s “interpersonal relations,” Stratton read, “He may use other people for his own gratification with little concern for their needs.”
“Does that sound like anyone we know?” asked Stratton. “Like his mentor, Dr. Reardon?”
It was too late to object, without just rubbing it in. The defense trio held their fire.
In the space of eight minutes, Stratton had red checkmarks besides all but one of Dr. Marans’ list of typical child sex abuse symptoms.
“This [evaluation tool] is the gold standard!,” Stratton exclaimed.
“I hold it in high regard,” Kelly conceded
But on re-direct, Kelly stuck to his opinion that Doe was little changed by his experiences at the hands of George Reardon. •
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