Court Opinion

ID: 9778945
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 21:27:17.499878+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:23:31.698231
License: Public Domain

GRAVES, Justice,
dissenting.
Respectfully, I must dissent. Under the circumstances of this ease, the blood test results should be admissible as reliable evidence. The blood samples were initially taken for medical diagnosis and treatment and not for a criminal prosecution. Had criminal prosecution, such as DUI (where blood is drawn at the hospital and then sent to a state police laboratory), been the primary purpose for taking and analyzing the blood samples, I would concur with Justice Cooper. However, these blood samples were routinely taken and analyzed in accordance with modern everyday hospital practices, presumably for the primary purpose of saving life. There is a presumption that the vial of blood carried the decedent’s identification from the hospital to the laboratory. To require proof of chain of custody of blood samples or other body fluids should not be necessary when these same results are used by medical professionals for the purposes of making life and death determinations in arriving at decisions concerning diagnosis and treatment. It is not reasonable to hold a treating physician, operating under exigent circumstances to save a life, to *12the same standards as a trained detective in collecting and preserving evidence for criminal prosecution.
[T]he calling of all the individual attendant physicians and nurses who have cooperated to make the record even of a single patient would be a serious interference with convenience of hospital management. There is a Circumstantial Guarantee of Trustworthiness; for the records are made and relied upon in affairs of life and death. Moreover, amidst the day-to-day details of scores of hospital cases, the physicians and nurses can ordinarily recall from actual memory few or none of the specific data entered; they themselves rely upon the record of their own action; hence, to call them to the stand would ordinarily add little or nothing to the information furnished by the record alone....
Buckler v. Commonwealth, Ky., 541 S.W.2d 935, 938 (1976).
Further, requiring proof of a chain of custody before allowing the admissibility of the results of analysis of body fluids by a hospital laboratory would nullify the benefits of KRS 422.305 and KRS 422.310. Moreover, hospitals may likely be reluctant to assist or cooperate in investigations of crimes due to time and cost. In this case, satisfying the chain of custody requirements may have taken additional time when time was of the essence for commencing treatment.
The proof of authenticity may come in any form. Here, the medical autopsy proved that the decedent died from hypoglycemia due to an insulin overdose. Since the blood analy-ses proved accurate in the diagnosis, which was confirmed by the response to the subsequent treatment and the ultimate demise of the decedent, these results should constitute a prima facie showing of authenticity of the blood samples with the burden of proof being on the challenger to show lack of authenticity of same.
The fact that an autopsy confirmed the diagnosis of death due to hypoglycemia resulting from insulin overdose authenticates the hearsay data concerning the blood samples. Therefore, this data should be legally sufficient proof of the reliability of the blood samples even though chain of custody was not established. A hand written notation of 1672 micro units per milliliter should not affect the admissibility, because the printout showed an amount greater than 240 micro units per milliliter when anything over 20 micro units per milliliter indicated a pathological condition consistent with the final proven diagnosis.
In Buckler, supra, this Court established the following standard by which to measure the admissibility of opinion testimony that is based, in part, on hearsay evidence.
[W]e adopt as an exception to the hearsay rule in Kentucky that an expert may properly express an opinion based upon information supplied by third parties which is not in evidence, but upon which the expert customarily relies in the practice of his profession. Our previous opinions to the contrary are hereby overruled. We emphasize that the type of information which can be utilized by the expert in forming his opinion would be only that produced by qualified personnel and on which the expert would customarily rely on in the day-to-day decisions attendant to his profession. Such a limitation, we feel, guarantees a relatively high degree of reliability and frees the expert to use for his testimony the tools on which he normally relies in making a diagnosis.
Id. at 940.
Judge Palmore’s comments in Henderson v. Commonwealth, Ky., 507 S.W.2d 454 (1974), should not apply in this case because we have impersonal, high volume, mass produced managed health care, not careless investigatory procedures by law enforcement officers. As our highest Court stated in Brown v. Commonwealth, Ky., 449 S.W.2d 738, 740 (1969), “We cannot visualize any motive on the part of those who handled the blood sample to tamper with it. That there was any tampering is the barest speculation, which is not enough to destroy its integrity.” Here, ample indicia of reliability make it improbable that the blood analyzed was from anyone other than the decedent.
In my view this is a needless reversal for insubstantial reasons, contrary to settled Kentucky law, which introduces a non-sub*13stantive procedural barrier into the criminal justice system. There is no need to require more precise identification of blood when it is used as evidence in a criminal case than the clinician requires when using the results of blood testing for diagnosis and treatment. In circumstances such as these, we should have sufficient confidence in the integrity and proficiency of the medial profession to require no greater standard than it requires of itself.
LAMBERT and WINTERSHEIMER, JJ., join this dissenting opinion.