HEALTH-ZIMBABWE: Doctor Sentenced For Culpable Homicide

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Lewis Machipisa

HARARE, Mar 11 1999 (IPS) - British-born anaesthetist, Dr. Richard McGown, who was found guilty two-years ago of culpable homicide due to experiments on his patients, was Thursday sentenced to six months in prison.

The sentence came after McGowan lost his appeal against the conviction.

McGowan was convicted in January 1995 on two out of five counts of culpable homicide after the court ruled he had negligently administered “dangerous doses of morphine.”

McGowan had pleaded not guilty to all counts.

He was slapped with a 12-month jail term of which six were suspended and fined 1,250 U.S. Dollars for the deaths of two children — Kenyan-born Lavender Khaminwa aged 10 and two-year- old Kalpesh Nagidas, a Zimbabwean of Indian origin — between 1986 and 1990.

Nagindas died in 1988 after a circumcision operation, during which McGowan injected him with 1.25 mgs of morphine. Khaminwa died after receiving a lethal dose of morphine during an appendicectomy operation in 1990.

McGowan was acquitted for the deaths of Zimbabwean Tsiti Chidodo (4), Irene Papatheocharous and Nigerian Rose Apinke Osazuwa (62). McGown, 61, has to surrender himself to prison officials within 48 hours.

The prosecution alleged that McGowan, a naturalised Zimbabwean, administered an adult dose of four milligrammes of caudal morphine to Khaminwa before an operation to remove an appendix.

He administered 1.25 mg to Nagidas before a circumcision. In all the cases heard, the court ruled that the dosages were “unacceptably high”.

McGowan began administering epidural morphine to children in 1981 on his own initiative, arguing that since it worked on adults, it would also work on children. He also admitted to having carried out anaesthetic experiments on more than 500 patients without their knowledge.

Many Zimbabweans said McGowan should have been charged with culpable homicide instead of murder.

During the trial, Zimbabwe’s Attorney General Patrick Chinamasa, who headed the prosecution team, described the anesthetist as ‘a messenger of death stalking our hospitals’.

Even the relatives of the dead have publicly expressed their disgust at the court for passing such a “light sentence”.

Mansukh Nagindas, whose son died, described the sentence as a “mockery of justice.”