Court Opinion

ID: 9635382
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 13:49:25.478694+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:26.373082
License: Public Domain

LOWE, Judge,
dissenting.
I am troubled that we are imposing upon “the other” learned profession scruples endemic to our own. Our depiction of the witness tampering or attempted obstruction of justice as “outrageous” was a natural legal knee-jerk reaction. To a profession founded upon principles of justice the conduct is “outrageous”; even to society generally, conduct of similar character in the seventies was seen as sufficiently reprehensible to have warranted a presidential resignation. But is it peculiarly relevant to “a physician in his practice as a physician?”
*408Dr. McDonnell was not charged with immoral conduct constituting the crime applicable alike to president or pauper; nor was he charged with immoral conduct in violation of the ethics of the legal profession. He was reprimanded for “immoral conduct of a physician in his practice as a physician.” To permit our “knee-jerk reaction” to carry over upon review of this administrative reprimand, exhibits a professional bias that judges of all people must strain to avoid permitting to color our judgment.
Because words are the tools of our profession (like potions those of a doctor) it was not improper for the majority to support the Commission’s ruling by defining immorality as proscribed by the statute from Black's Law Dictionary. But it is incongruous I think, then abruptly to reverse course seeking solace from the medical expertise of the nine physician colleagues on the Commission to determine the scope of its own jurisdiction by holding that an intentional interference of the judicial process after consultation with counsel, was conducted “in his practice as a physician.”
We define “mortality” from our perspective but rely upon doctors for statutory interpretation. Statutory interpretation involving legislative intent is our responsibility, not that of a commission of medical specialists. Whether the nine doctors on the Commission consider an interference with the judicial process by Dr. McDonnell as conduct “in his practice as a physician” over which they have jurisdiction is of no consequence. We are to be concerned only with what the Legislature intended and the Legislature recently clarified the jurisdictional limitations it intended by rephrasing that particular discipline.
When it revised its language to condemn immoral conduct “in the practice of medicine” the restrictive purpose of the third discipline should have become abundantly clear — if not to medical practitioners on the Commission — certainly to those of us supposedly versed in statutory analysis. We know from the Revisor’s Note that no substantive change was intended by substituting the new language “in the *409practice of medicine” for that under which Dr. McDonnell was tried, “in his practice as a physician”. See Revisor’s Note following § 14-504. That new more restrictive language if not intended as substantive but clarifying only, was clearly intended to avoid precisely the interpretation that was given by the Commission and this Court. The Legislature could hardly have made it clearer that the only immoral conduct for which a doctor could be held accountable by his colleagues under the “Health Occupations” Code was that committed in the practice of medicine or as previously phrased by “a physician in his practice as a physician”. Even judges would have found it difficult to come up with more restrictive language to indicate the limited narrow jurisdiction intended to be bestowed upon the Medical Discipline Commission.
One need not be clairvoyant to see that the Legislature intended no greater demands upon doctors in their social intercourse or even in their enforced judicial encounters, than upon anyone else by imposing that discipline upon them as practitioners of medicine, even before the semantic clarification. The punishment of the immoral conduct prescribed was left to the judgment of medical peers, because the immoral conduct within “the practice of medicine” had nuances not necessarily familiar to laymen, lawyers or even judges. It is within that special field of endeavor — “the practice of medicine” — that called for the expertise and judgment of a commission of colleagues.
It is simply not relevant that Dr. McDonnell’s conduct may have violated the law. If such it did, he was subject to prosecution as anyone else would have been. Significantly, in my reading of the statute, he could only have been reprimanded by his peers in that cause if he had been convicted by a criminal court. Md.Health Occ.Code Ann., § 14r-504(6) expressly provides:
“Subject to the hearing provisions of § 14-505 of this subtitle, the Commission on the affirmative vote of a majority of its full authorized membership, may repri*410mand any licensee, place any licensee on probation, or suspend or revoke a license if the licensee:
(6) Is convicted of or pleads guilty or nolo contendere with respect to a crime involving moral turpitude, whether or not any appeal or other proceeding is pending to have the conviction or plea set aside;”.
When read in context with the other disciplines, it is clear that if the Legislature had intended subsection (3)1 to have been so broadly interpreted, subsection (6) would have been unnecessarily redundant and consequently superfluous. And yet, I cannot fault the indignation felt by the majority, however, in light of the Doctor’s attempt to intimidate witnesses. I can even understand how the Doctor’s colleagues on the Commission would wish to disassociate their profession from such conduct — after it had been publicized— even by so mild a sanction. There is some irony, if not a message, in the fact that before proceeding with his plan, the doctor sought the advice of an attorney — rather than another physician. Despite the fact that the obloquy fell upon the Doctor and not a suggestion of criticism upon his counsel, I am even more convinced that the Doctor’s breach was of the general moral concepts of society as enforced by the legal profession, not merely or particularly of other physicians. If the breach were indigenous to either profession it clearly was ours, but a breach of our Code of Professional Responsibility does not violate a medical discipline nor warrant a medical reprimand. The legal sensitivity in our concept of professional right and wrong, commanding the maintenance of the integrity of the judicial system I believe, causes my colleagues to err in binding physician intruders to our ethical standards, rather than leaving them to the law generally that is our professional altar. The sanctions imposed should have been those of the society it offended or none at all.
*411To salve the retributive conscience of my brethren (and that of the Doctors as well) I suggest reflection upon the consequences of our having published and denounced his “outrageous” conduct in Meyer v. McDonnell, 40 Md.App. 524, 392 A.2d 1129 (1978). We reversed his successful defense upon the multi-million dollar attack upon his assets and reputation instructing that the outrage could be considered in determining the standard of his previous care of a medical patient. With that incongruous legal burden he chose to settle the case previously won at a pecuniary cost to which we are not privy.
The price to his reputation is more readily perceptible. Few, if any, of his peers, professional or social, could claim the distinction of having had the second highest court in the State publicly “ravel out” their “weaved-up folly”.
But even that published embarrassment was not to be the end. His peers, perhaps chagrined at the exposure of a perceived professional “conspiracy of silence”, were able to disassociate medicine from his immorality but could not in conscience smite him too hard for what he had done. Rather they “reprimanded” him professionally which ironically may have circumvented more appropriate societal sanctions.
Perhaps because he too felt that the source of this wrist-slap was not justified in rendering its judgment, or even if an amoral attitude still fails to perceive an impropriety, that de minimis sanction became his heaviest burden. Again the spontaneity of his judgment will cost him more than he could have gained. Again he ravels out his “weaved-up folly” by causing to be published a second “record of his offences”, that any of his peers who missed the first version may read another “lecture” of them.2 If the distinction readily recognized even by legal novitiates — between warn*412ing questionable witnesses of the consequences of perjury and implicitly threatening them professionally through prestigious peers — was at one time lost upon this seasoned medical man, he should certainly recognize it now. The price of his education in legal morality, has not been cheap by any standard, and had the charge been made before an appropriate tribunal it may well have been far greater. The fact remains that the conduct condemned was not contemplated as a subject of the restricted jurisdiction of the Commission of Medical Discipline of Maryland.
Because I too deeply resent improper intrusions in the judicial process, I am reluctant to affirm the trial judge’s exoneration of the intruder. Because we must protect as sacred ground upon which he trod I cannot condone an improper use of the process even to effect a just result. Our system has sanctions and our process has procedures equipped to cope with conduct intended to distort the judicial process. When we permit the Commission’s act of publicly washing its hands to serve as a substantive sanction for what the judicial process had failed to do, it is a disservice demeaning to both. I must respectfully dissent.

. “(3) Is guilty of immoral conduct in the practice of medicine;”.

. “Must I do so? And must I ravel out
My weaved-up folly ...
If thy offences were upon record,
Would it not shame thee in so fair a troop To read a lecture of them?”
W. Shakespeare, Richard The Second.