Dentist Cleared on Most Counts

A Pasadena pediatric dentist accused of over-sedating her patients and causing brain damage to one was acquitted Tuesday on five dozen criminal charges. But the jury deadlocked on three counts.

After an often emotional four-month trial, Drueciel Ford, 50, smiled broadly and hugged one of her attorneys as the court clerk in Los Angeles Superior Court read the final not-guilty verdict.

“Thank you, God,” she said as she later hugged her husband.

District attorney’s prosecutors, who appeared shocked, declined to speak to reporters, citing the prospects of a retrial on the three counts.

The panel deliberated for 21/2 days before acquitting Ford of charges ranging from child endangerment to using unlicensed assistants. Those charges involved more than 30 children.

Jurors could not reach a verdict on two counts of child endangerment and one of conspiracy. Judge Lance Ito declared a mistrial on those charges.

Defense attorneys said they will ask Ito to dismiss the charges, noting that not more than two jurors favored guilty on the counts. If convicted of all the counts, Ford had faced up to 30 years in prison.

“I am just so happy, totally happy.... I would never have been able to make it through this if not for my friends, family and my faith in God,” Ford said outside court, about two years after her arrest.

“The big thing I want to make clear is that my prayers go out to Melissa McGrath’s family,” she said.

McGrath had been undergoing treatment at Ford’s Pasadena clinic in March 1999 when she suffered a heart attack that left her brain damaged and unable to write or do such tasks as tie her shoes or shower on her own.

It was McGrath’s heart attack that drew police to Ford’s clinic and led them to interview dozens of parents who alleged their children had been over-sedated.

The case revived a larger debate over whether, and when, it is appropriate to charge a medical professional with a crime for problems that occur during treatment.

Ford’s attorneys said prosecutors lacked evidence to support its allegations of child endangerment.

“It is a vindication for Dr. Ford and proves it should not have been in the criminal system at all,” said Robert McNeill, one of her attorneys.

During the trial, where dozens of parents, several expert witnesses and Ford’s dental assistants testified, prosecutors insisted she was driven by greed. Her practice, they said, resembled a production line, where the misuse of oral sedatives caused patients to leave in a rag-doll state and caused McGrath’s brain damage.

Witnesses called by Deputy Dist. Atty. Albert MacKenzie alleged that McGrath received six times the maximum dose of the sedative, chloral hydrate, while having a tooth pulled. They said she suffered a heart attack and was clinically dead in Ford’s office for 28 minutes before paramedics resuscitated her.

McNeill and co-defense lawyer Edi Faal, however, portrayed Ford as a caring dentist victimized by a misfortune that was turned into a criminal case.

“From the onset, we knew Dr. Ford did nothing wrong. There was a medical misadventure,” Faal said of the McGrath incident.

A cardiologist from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center testified for the defense that McGrath’s heart attack was not caused by the sedative but was a result of her fainting. Another defense expert testified that it was not unusual for children to leave a dentist office sleepy.

Ford’s attorneys exploited that expert testimony and apparent problems with evidence. Under their cross-examination, a dental board investigator testified that neither he nor Pasadena police had obtained samples of McGrath’s blood taken at the hospital and never sought a test for levels of chloral hydrate.

In closing arguments, Faal accused Pasadena police and dental investigators of persuading witnesses to give statements favorable to the prosecution. A dental board investigator initially had testified that Dana Harmon, a Ford assistant, told him she gave McGrath a few teaspoons of chloral hydrate, within the allowable dosage of 2,000 milligrams.

Based on that statement and other evidence, a prosecutor who headed the medical case unit for the county district attorney rejected the case in October 1999.

But the investigator testified that in December 1999, Harmon told him she had lied, and that McGrath actually had received a large cup of the sedative, about six times the recommended dose.

Defense attorneys noted that Harmon by that time had filed a workers’ compensation claim against Ford’s practice for job stress.

Another key witness was McGrath’s mother, Jan McGrath, who told investigators her daughter had been given two half-cup doses.

But it was revealed that in a separate case, prosecutors had charged Jan McGrath with perjury in a case involving welfare benefits. That case is pending.

Ford’s license had been suspended pending the outcome of the criminal charges.

McNeill said the next step is to get back Ford’s four children, whom social workers had removed from her home. He said, “The jury has given those children back to her.”