Misleading article distorts facts

By Clyde Spillenger

The Daily Bruin’s lead story on April 27 concerning the
Sujon Guha case (“University compensates $8 million in
suicide case,” News) is confused, and in some places
seriously misleading. I have no independent knowledge of the case;
I had never heard of it before reading your article. But it is
clear to me simply from reading the article that readers cannot get
from it a fair and accurate account of what happened in court.

The headline reads, “University compensates $8 million in
suicide case.” But the text of the article does not support
that assertion. The university, or so the text indicates, has not
compensated anyone. The university apparently has had an $8 million
verdict rendered against it by a jury, and is (so far as I can make
out from the article) still making motions in the trial court to
reduce the amount; it may yet take an appeal to a higher court.
That does not constitute “compensating” anyone.

The first 12 paragraphs of the article are about the civil jury
award, the background of the case and possible appeals. Then, in
paragraph 13, we read this phrase: “After the settlement …
“ What settlement? Wasn’t there simply a jury verdict
that is now being appealed, as the first 12 paragraphs seem to
indicate? Or was there a settlement between the parties, which is
flatly inconsistent with the notion of UCLA’s making an
appeal? If the first part of the article is accurate, the parties
would no doubt be surprised to discover that they had entered into
a “settlement.”

The article says almost nothing to shed light on the nature of
the negligence that the jury evidently found on the part of the
university. The jury, we are told, found that no medical
experiments were performed on Guha; evidently, Guha’s death
had long ago been been determined to be a suicide.

Evidently, “foul play” (whatever is meant by this
term) has never been found by any jury to have been responsible for
Guha’s death, despite the claims of the plaintiffs and their
lawyer that are given continuing play in The Bruin’s story.
What, then, were the negligent acts of the hospital? Was it just
holiday understaffing? The reader is never told how and why this
understaffing led to Guha’s death, and what evidence was
introduced to establish the fact.

We are never told what court this case was tried in; for all we
know, it could have been adjudicated as one of the UCLA School of
Law’s mock trials. We are never told when the jury verdict
was handed down; it could have been any time in the last
six-and-a-half years. We are never told if the court has actually
entered judgment against the university, or whether there has been
only a verdict that is being held in abeyance while the judge
entertains post-verdict motions.

Finally, one has to read paragraph 9 at least three times before
realizing what it is really trying to say: that Guha’s
distress prior to entering the hospital was attributed to his
having incorrectly followed instructions in taking a medication
““ rather than that his “suicidal tendencies” were
“attributed to him incorrectly,” a drastically
different statement.

I have no idea what really happened in this case, or what the
jury actually decided. But I know that the article is woefully
incomplete, and probably unfair to the parties in the case. No
doubt one or the other of the parties will contact The Bruin to
complain; I simply wanted to let you know that even an uninformed,
disinterested reader can see that this article was inadequate. I
believe a detailed correction would be appropriate.