Dentist Won’t Be Retried on Final 3 Counts

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office will not retry a Pasadena pediatric dentist after a jury acquitted her last week of 60 of 63 criminal charges related to allegations that she over-sedated her patients.

Prosecutors on Tuesday said that they will ask Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance Ito to dismiss the three charges--one of conspiracy and two of child endangerment--on which jurors declared themselves hopelessly deadlocked.

The announcement brought to an end a criminal investigation against Drueciel Ford, 50, that lasted more than two years and involved more than 30 children, including a 15-year-old girl who suffered brain damage.

During the four-month trial, prosecutors characterized Ford’s practice as a production line where the overuse of an oral sedative, chloral hydrate, caused patients to leave in a rag-doll state and caused Melissa McGrath to suffer brain damage after a heart attack.

Ford’s attorneys, however, portrayed her as a caring dentist victimized by a “medical misadventure” involving one patient and a prosecutor who believed sleepy children amounted to child endangerment.

The prosecutors’ announcement came on the heels of a news conference by a group of prominent African Americans who urged Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley to drop the charges against Ford, a well-known African American professional.

They warned that doing anything else would be perceived as prejudicial treatment of a “person of color.” If prosecutors decided to try her again, some said, they would seek a federal probe.

But prosecutors said the news conference was unnecessary because the decision to drop the charges was made at the district attorney’s executive staff meeting Monday.

On March 5, jurors found Ford not guilty of 60 criminal charges, which ranged from criminal endangerment to allowing assistants to practice dentistry without a license. They deadlocked on the conspiracy count and one endangerment count, with 10 favoring acquittal. They also deadlocked on another endangerment charge, with 11 voting to acquit.

Ford’s attorney, Robert H. McNeill, said he was delighted to hear Cooley had taken “the correct and appropriate action.”

“We regret that Dr. Ford had to go through all this suffering, harassment and financial hardship that left her business closed since February 2000, and forced her to spend untold thousands of dollars on this case and getting her children back from foster care,” he said.

Ford still faces two civil lawsuits and potential action by the state Dental Board, which suspended her license pending the outcome of the criminal case, McNeill said. Authorities also took away her four children because of the child endangerment allegations, he said. The children remain in foster care.

McNeill said he hoped that Cooley would keep a tight rein on his prosecutors and not allow them to pursue cases without merit. Deputy Dist. Atty. Albert MacKenzie, who prosecuted the case, told a newspaper last week that he would recommend at a minimum retrying the conspiracy count. That comment, McNeill said, prompted the news conference outside the downtown criminal courts building Tuesday.

“Let the woman go back to her family; anything less than that is malicious and a miscarriage of justice,” said Danny Bakewell, president of the Brotherhood Crusade and a defense witness at the trial.

After the announcement, Bakewell said, “We certainly do have a responsive district attorney for the first time in a long time. This is a man who is not afraid to step up and take the hard decisions.”

In an interview Tuesday before the announcement, Ford said her prayers go out to McGrath’s family, and that she had faith in the jury system.

Ford said she has paid dearly with her children thrust into foster care while the criminal case was ongoing. “I don’t get to see them,” she said. “My little boy, every time he sees a police car, he says, ‘Mommy are they going to take you to jail?’”