The American Medical Association’s 2007 Vote on Disaster Medicine Immunity Proposal brought the controversy over Anna Pou’s conduct at Memorial into a national debate about how far ordinary medical and legal standards should bend during a disaster. At its annual meeting in Chicago, the organization voted to develop model legislation shielding disaster physicians from civil and criminal prosecution unless they acted with malice. The decision did not settle Pou’s case; it made the medical profession’s desired protections a central part of the debate before a jury or judge had ruled on the allegations.

Background and Stakes

As the anniversary of the arrests approached, the American Medical Association published the first issue of a new journal on disaster medicine. Its cover showed a post-Katrina shelter, and a preliminary report indicated that New Orleans’ death rate had risen dramatically after the storm. Articles in the issue cited Pou’s case as an argument for new policies. Her prosecution had thus become more than an individual legal matter: it stood as a test of what physicians might be permitted, expected, or protected in circumstances of extreme scarcity and danger.

The organization’s ethics council convened an open forum at the annual meeting to consider whether normal medical standards should be altered during disasters. The council’s appointed members were responsible for the profession’s code of ethics. Alongside that discussion, policymakers planned a vote on a campaign encouraging states to protect doctors from liability in disasters unless they acted maliciously—even in cases of gross negligence. The American Medical Association represented only a minority of American physicians, and many doctors opposed its policies, but its lobbying and political-donation organizations gave it considerable influence over legislation.

Simmons’s Argument

Rick Simmons, Pou’s lawyer, traveled to the Hilton Chicago to support both proposals. Addressing an audience beneath the ballroom’s large chandeliers, he argued that a disaster could overwhelm medical resources so completely that some patients would go untreated and die. In his account, decisions involving DNR orders and doctors’ concerns for their own safety could become part of that triage, while families could later sue physicians who had acted under emergency conditions. If doctors were expected to respond to disasters, Simmons maintained, they needed legal protection.

He also challenged the suitability of established end-of-life safeguards in a catastrophe. National guidelines required protections developed in the wake of Nazi crimes, including consent from patients or their proxies and documentation of decisions and actions. Simmons argued that such steps might not be available during a disaster, leaving physicians to exercise their own judgment in good faith. To support the possibility of separating patients considered beyond emergency care from others and sedating them, he invoked guidance from the World Medical Association that Pou had sent him after a symposium in Houston.

Simmons compared doctors’ exposure to prosecution with the protections public officials had for certain errors in judgment. He proposed a federal law that would require complaints about physicians’ actions in disasters to be reviewed by other doctors rather than lawyers and judges, thereby restricting the role of state prosecutors and bereaved relatives. To answer concerns that this arrangement served doctors alone, he proposed a compensation fund for victims’ families. He closed by thanking the American Medical Association on Pou’s behalf and expressing the hope that no other doctor would endure an ordeal like hers.

The Vote and Its Immediate Meaning

The delegates voted to create model legislation intended to shield disaster physicians from civil and criminal prosecution. Under the proposed standard, members would be encouraged to lobby nationwide for legislation requiring proof that a doctor had acted with malice to harm a patient before conviction. The organization also committed to intensifying its existing opposition to criminal prosecution of medical judgment, now giving particular emphasis to doctors working in emergencies.

The vote was a step toward a legislative campaign, not a judicial finding about what had happened at Memorial. Its scope was also broader than Simmons’s proposal for federal review of complaints: the delegates approved the creation of model legislation and encouraged lobbying for a new standard. The meeting translated the argument for disaster immunity into an organized policy position, while leaving the legal and factual questions in Pou’s case unresolved.

Professional Response and Unresolved Questions

The timing sharpened the vote’s significance. No jury or judge had yet ruled on Pou’s case, and Pou had not publicly described what she had done. Nevertheless, the American Medical Association’s principal response to the alleged murders at Memorial was to defend the profession and seek legal protections for its members. Its action placed the risks physicians might face in emergencies at the forefront, while the claims of patients and bereaved families remained part of a dispute the proposed legislation was designed to channel away from ordinary prosecution.

The meeting exposed a difficult boundary between emergency judgment and accountability. Simmons’s case depended on conditions in which consent and documentation might be impossible, and in which physicians could face choices about who received limited care. But the standard the delegates supported—protection unless malice could be proved—also raised the stakes of how grossly negligent care would be treated. The vote therefore made the Memorial controversy a precedent-setting policy argument even before the underlying case had reached a verdict.