The Second Section of the Provincial Court of Las Palmas has acquitted a dentist from Lanzarote who was accused of a crime of procedural fraud for allegedly falsifying a document to cover up medical negligence in a dental clinic on the island. An appeal may be filed against the ruling before the Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands.
The Prosecutor's Office was asking for two years in prison for him, while the private prosecution raised it to eight years. The events date back to January 2016. The dentist L.M.D.C., as the owner of the only maxillofacial clinic in Lanzarote with an agreement, treated a minor who was referred by the Canary Islands Health Service to this center to have a supernumerary tooth extracted, that is, a piece that was left over between the central incisors.
The minor's mother then reported that in the clinic they extracted a permanent tooth and not the one indicated by the public doctors and sued the Canary Islands Health Service for the alleged damages suffered by her daughter. The lawsuit was dismissed. After that, she filed an administrative appeal against said resolution. The Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands also dismissed her appeal.
Faced with this ruling, the mother claimed that the doctor had "added in handwriting" the informed consent for the oral surgery, a process that must be signed when a patient undergoes an intervention of this type, where she was informed that she was going to extract the permanent tooth and/or the supernumerary tooth and accused the doctor of allegedly falsifying the documents that meant that she was not compensated for the damage against the minor.
The judgment of the Provincial Court, issued on March 7, to which La Voz has had access, states that "there is no evidence to disprove" the presumption of innocence of the accused and that the falsehood of the documents has not been "duly proven", so "the accusation of procedural fraud must be dropped".
The Chamber adds that "it has not been proven" that the accused "made any alteration" to the content of the documents after they were signed by the minor's mother.
Among them, the Court points out the "clear insecurity" of the expert who accessed the documents, who could not guarantee that they had been manipulated after their signature. Thus, the trial included the testimonies of three dentists, two of whom resolved that there was no malpractice in the extraction of the permanent piece instead of the supernumerary one, while a third assured that that piece should not have been extracted.
Among the evidence offered and used by the accusations, the Court alludes to one of the documents and attributes "to an administrative error" that the extraction of the supernumerary was reported, although in reality a permanent piece had been extracted and adds that "it is absurd to report the opposite to what is objectively true"
To conclude, the Chamber highlighted that "very well-founded doubts arise" about the crimes attributed to the accused and opted for his acquittal.