The Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, tried in Sweden for aggravated ill-treatment, was sentenced on Thursday June 16 to “two years probation“having made himself responsible for”bodily harmon one of his patients.
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“Given the condition of the first two patients, this tribunal finds that their treatments were justified“, said the magistrates in a press release. But in the case of the third patient, the court ruled that the surgeon had disregarded the result on the first two and should be sentenced to two years probation having made himself responsible for “bodily harmof this patient. “At the time of the treatment of the third patient, the experience acquired with the first two cases was such that he should have refrained from having him undergo this intervention.“, added the court.
“Five years in prison”
A suspended sentence with probation is an alternative sentence replacing a prison sentence. The Italian researcher rose to world fame in 2011 by performing the world’s first transplant of an artificial plastic trachea to be colonized by the patient’s stem cells. At the end of the last day of his trial in Solna on the outskirts of Stockholm on Monday, prosecutor Jim Westerberg had estimated that the charges justified a sentence of “clearly more than five years in prison“.
The Italian surgeon, who appeared free, operated on eight people between 2011 and 2014, including three at the Karolinska Institute hospital in Stockholm, from which the committee that awards the Nobel Prize for Medicine originated. Of Paolo Macchiarini’s patients, only one survived, having had the artificial trachea designed and implanted by the doctor removed during an operation in Russia in 2014. The three patients treated in Sweden died, although the direct link between their death and the surgeries has not been established.
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Prosecutors argued that Paolo Macchiarini’s surgeries went against “science“and that the surgeon had acted”carefree» by continuing treatment despite the appearance of complications.
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