![]() Many, like the Minnesota board, can discipline doctors for behavior a "reasonable" patient might interpret as sexual. Though the charges he was acquitted of require a finding of intent, medical boards don't have to find intent. ![]() In a trial last year, a jury found Smith not guilty of 10 counts of fourth-degree felony sexual misconduct, each carrying a penalty of up to 10 years in jail. The team - two psychiatrists, two psychologists and a pastoral counselor (a former nun) - inquires into his childhood, his marriage, his religious beliefs and the encounters that led to the complaints against him. Three days into the assessment, Smith has had a medical workup and is undergoing a dozen psychological and neurological tests. But Smith the doctor is the patient here, paying $5,000 to undergo an intensive evaluation by experts who take the mental temperatures of doctors and other professionals accused of sexual misconduct. He puts in eight-hour days, shuttling from one bland office to another, as if on rounds. For the past two years, however, the Smiths' lives have been dominated by charges that the doctor indulged in behavior of the most intemperate sort that in the privacy of his medical office, he touched women's breasts in a sexual manner during respiratory and breast exams.Įvery morning this week, Smith dons a sports jacket, tie and freshly pressed shirt, courtesy of Peggy, and drives his immaculate white Honda five miles into Minneapolis to the Professional Assessment Program, a couple of offices and a conference room on the fifth floor of the old nurses' quarters at Abbott Northwestern Hospital. ![]() But on this March night not even a crescent creases the sky, and the ice remains dark, unrevealing.Īt the kitchen table, the light is neither bright nor dim, the middling wattage of a man and a woman who dwell, above all, in moderation. When the moon is full, the frozen lawn becomes a spotlight on the Smiths' spacious 1950's beige-brick rambler in suburban Minneapolis. Through the kitchen windows, a sheet of ice hard enough for skating glimmers in the front yard. The 63-year-old family practitioner is sitting beside his wife, Peggy, who has just cleared the dinner table of leftover breaded perch, bowls of peas and buttered noodles. SMITH ANSWERS IMMEDIATELY, "I NEVER had a sexual thought while I was examining a patient." Beneath drooping eyebrows, his pale hazel eyes are unblinking.
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