Daniele Canarelli was given a suspended prison sentence of one year, in the first case of its kind in France.....I can't understand the logic of saying that the doctor should "have placed him in a specialised unit for difficult patients" when the court let him free. Maybe I'm missing some subtlety about the similarity between this "unit" and "medical supervision." Are we talking about confining the man or not?
While accepting that there was no such thing as "zero risk" in such cases and that doctors could not predict the actions of their patients, the court found that Canarelli had made several mistakes in [Joel] Gaillard's treatment....
The court's Fabrice Castoldi said Canarelli should either have placed him in a specialised unit for difficult patients or referred him to another team.
Gaillard killed 80-year-old Germain Trabuc with an axe in March 2004 in the town of Gap.
He had been judged not responsible for his actions due to his suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and was freed under medical supervision.
Using criminal law against the doctor is extremely hard to comprehend. (In the U.S., I think the issues have only been about civil cases in which private citizens seek damages.) But if we did want to try to institutionalize more of our mentally ill citizens — the ones who seem to threaten violence — we could exploit the doctors by scaring them with criminal liability.
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