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In March the Medical Board of California charged orthopedic surgeon Fereydoune Shirazi with improper behavior during a 1990 operation. Shirazi allegedly took an 11-minute rest-room break while an operation was in progress and forgot to turn off a machine called a nucleotome, which has tiny blades that cut inside a patient’s spinal column.
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In February, minutes before a jury would have ruled against her claim, Joyce Caudle reached a settlement with the company that sold her the stationary exercise bicycle she claimed was responsible for a $200,000 injury in 1991. According to Caudle, who weighed 264 pounds at the time, the post on which the seat was mounted burst through the seat and ruptured her rectum and intestines.
Oklahoma District Judge Melinda Monnet, 33, was recently accused of mental incompetence by the state’s supreme court chief justice and faces a trial in June that will decide whether she can keep her job. Among the charges: after divorcing her first husband, she allowed him to adopt her two months later. A classmate from law school said Monnet was “weird even back then.”
