Medical Information for Law Librarians
Did you know that health databases can provide vital resources needed for court cases?
Sometimes, the medical information found in law libraries can save a life.
It was a Matlock moment: the February 18, 2004, acquittal of Alan Gell in rural Bertie County, North Carolina. Gell had spent the last nine years on death row for the murder of Allen Ray Jenkins, who was found dead in his house of a gunshot wound on April 14, 1995.
Gell’s girlfriend, fifteen-year-old Shanna Hall, told police that she and Gell, along with another girl named Crystal Morris, had committed a robbery that got out of hand. In exchange for their testimony, Hall and Morris were not charged. Gell wasn’t so lucky. He was found guilty and sentenced to death on March 3, 1998.
Two people thought Gell was innocent. One was Gell himself. The other was Jim Cooney, a high-profile attorney who got Gell a new trial, established that prosecutors had withheld evidence, and secured Gell’s freedom.
In particular, Cooney proved that the date assigned to Jenkins’s death, April 3, was wrong due to the condition of Jenkins’s body, which wasn’t decomposed enough. The actual date, according to new forensic evidence, was more like April 8 or 9, which gave Gell an adamantine alibi: He was already in jail for stealing a car.
In 2004, I was the librarian at Jim Cooney’s law firm. I remember this case. Cooney used medical textbooks and had an anatomy skeleton in his office. He subscribed to The New England Journal of Medicine. He was no doctor; he simply did what a lot of lawyers do who work in the areas of medical malpractice, personal injury, health care law, and criminal defense: rely on medical information sources.
Which ones are the best?
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Gateway Websites
A project of the National Library of Medicine which has been publicly available since 1996, this free database has over thirty-seven million citations and abstracts from biomedical and life sciences journals. Some citations link to full-text articles from other sources, such as the publisher or PubMed Central, a related archive of over ten million articles from nearly three thousand journals.
Also from the NLM, this site is meant for consumers, but it’s a great place to learn the basics of most diseases and injuries, especially as, being a US government site, it is ad-free, unlike Healthline or WebMD. Especially useful to legal researchers are the medical encyclopedia, whose entries often link to related PubMed articles, and the information on drugs, herbs, and supplements, which are invaluable to medical malpractice lawyers.
Which month is Migraine and Headache Awareness Month? What is the leading cause of boating accidents? Why should everyone be thankful for fruit flies? These questions and more are answered by this megabank of medical information.
For 125 years, the MLA has been the premier organization for librarians specializing in medical information search and retrieval. Legal researchers will be drawn to the consumer page, which links to a number of high-quality health websites as well as What Did My Doctor Say?, a medical jargon translator. There is also a feature for finding a medical librarian who can help with information searches.
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Forensic Science
Internet Pathology Laboratory for Medical Education
Despite its old-school look, this site is one of the most comprehensive collections of pathology information available on the internet. Hosted by the University of Utah Eccles Health Sciences Library, the site has over 2,700 annotated images, as well as tutorials on firearms, drug abuse pathology, and other subjects.
Guide to Medical Examiner and Coroner Cases
This publication by the American Association of Tissue Banks covers topics that any death investigator — and, therefore, any criminal defense attorney — needs to know. Topics include toxicology, radiography, documentation and record sharing, and more. The case studies in the book are especially helpful, as are the glossaries.
Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence
Footwear. Bloodstains. Latent fingerprints. Handwriting. These are a few of the topics covered by the resources on this site, which include e-books, PowerPoint slides, and open data sets.
This forensic science podcast covers major topics — suicide, blood pattern analysis, report writing, courtroom testimony — as well as subjects you might not think are relevant to forensics, such as the dangers of hoarding (make sure to listen for the 2015 case of a San Francisco hoarder whose stash contained a mummified body).
Rules of Evidence
The collection and presentation of forensic evidence, like all types of evidence, is governed by strict rules that differ from state to state. This site from Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute links to them all.
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Health Care Law
Owned by Thomson Reuters, the company that operates Westlaw, the leading legal research database on the market, FindLaw has tools for the public as well as practicing attorneys. This page of health care law resources links to federal and state statutes and regulations, as well as other topical lists, such as every state’s medical marijuana laws or “death with dignity” statutes.
National Health Law Program
Law librarians are often asked to find court documents — filings, briefs, forms — that attorneys can use as examples for their own work product. This site’s Resource Library has over 1,600 such documents, all on medical or health-related topics.
Health Law Research Guide
The Georgetown University Law Library offers some of the best research guides on the internet, and this one is no exception. Though some of the resources are available only to Georgetown students and faculty, the guide links to plenty of free websites, such as Congressional Research Services reports, think tanks and other academic institutions, and professional organizations. Especially useful are the statistical sites such as the National Center for Health Statistics.
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