Medical examiner in Florida lynching case gets license renewed

It had expired when he examined the body of young Martin Lee Anderson and ruled that he died from sickle-cell trait, hours after being so severely beaten in a Florida penal "boot camp" that the doctors said his organs were so badly damaged they couldn't be donated for transplants. Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiassen reports in Autopsy: At least doc got gender right 03/05/06:

Dr. Charles Siebert has renewed his license to practice medicine.

He's the medical examiner who recently ruled that 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson expired of "natural causes" after being kneed, choked and punched by guards at the Bay County Boot Camp.

Previously, Siebert had signed an autopsy report on a woman named Donna Reed in which he described her appendix, gallbladder, ovaries and uterus - organs that had been surgically removed years earlier, according to her mother.

As a bonus, Dr. Siebert also awarded Ms. Reed a prostate gland and two testicles, a mistake he attributed to conducting the autopsy during a storm-related power outage.

And how did Brother Jeb react as Florida governor to this outrage?

Pretty much like his big brother Dubya reacts to his own torture scandals:

The ruling has baffled sickle-cell experts, not to mention legislators, Martin's family and millions of TV viewers who've seen the disturbing videotape of the boy being kneed and shoved to the ground by a group of seven to nine guards on Jan. 5. He was rushed to a hospital and died the next day.

Incredibly, seven weeks afterward, Gov. Jeb Bush was saying he still hadn't seen the video. Maybe the VCR at the mansion was on the fritz, or maybe he got swept up watching the Olympic curling competition.

Regardless, it's a fairly serious event when a young teen dies under chaotic circumstances in state custody. Bush, a big fan of boot camps, has been slow to criticize anybody.

Is torturing dark-skinned people, and occasionally torturing them to death, always going to be a signature characteristic of regimes controlled by the Bush dynasty? This is like something straight out of the segregation days in the South, which seems to be pretty much how today's authoritarian Republican Party seems to think the whole country should be run.

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