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In May, the Justice Department indicted\u00a0Bynon and charged him with five counts of making false statements relating to health care matters. Bynon, the director of abdominal organ transplantation at Memorial Hermann, was accused of improperly preventing five patients from receiving organ transplants.<\/p>\n
The charges were the culmination of two years of controversy surrounding\u00a0Bynon and Memorial Hermann\u2019s transplant program. In 2024, the hospital announced that Bynon made \u201cinappropriate changes\u201d in a liver transplant database and temporarily suspended the program. Bynon later admitted to using his own process to effectively remove patients from the organ waiting list. Bynon told federal regulators his goal was to ensure that sick patients were \u201csafely transplanted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Organ transplant guidelines typically require patients who are too sick for surgery to be temporarily inactivated from the waiting list. Bynon’s lawyers have argued that following the guidelines could have negatively affected his patients’ chances of receiving a transplant in the future. Liver transplant candidates do not accrue time on the waiting list while they are inactivated.<\/p>\n
Two of the five patients at the center of the criminal case died before they could receive transplants, according to the indictment.<\/p>\n
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The Justice Department said Bynon\u2019s actions amounted to a crime. In a statement, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Ganjei said Bynon “stole years and hope from those who trusted him most.” Bynon, 66, faces the possibility of up to 25 years in prison if he is convicted by a jury and given the maximum sentence by a judge.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To get that far, however, the trial still must reach the jury stage. In pretrial hearings this week, Rosenthal admitted she had reservations about the Justice Department\u2019s strategy. For months, Bynon\u2019s lawyers have argued that prosecutors weren\u2019t explicit enough in their indictment about which false statements\u00a0Bynon made \u2014 a fact they said they needed to know to provide a defense.<\/p>\n
Rosenthal questions whether the allegations amount to a crime<\/p>\n
Bynon’s defense team has asked Rosenthal to dismiss the case.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rosenthal pushed prosecutors to be specific about their accusations.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe question is in all of this: it may be bad medicine, it may be contrary to hospital policy and procedure,\u201d Rosenthal said. \u201cWhere’s the crime?\u201d<\/p>\n
Assistant U.S. Attorney Suzanne Elmilady said Bynon\u2019s entries into UNet \u2013 an organ transplant web platform \u2013 misrepresented decisions made by Memorial Hermann\u2019s transplant review board. The board comprised of multiple experts determines eligibility for liver transplantation, and the government said Bynon took it upon himself to make a decision.<\/p>\n
Bynon\u2019s lawyers said the entries he made to the web system were meant to be exclusionary.<\/p>\n
When Bynon set one patient\u2019s maximum donor age at 8, for instance, his lawyers said he wasn\u2019t literally looking for a child\u2019s liver. Rather, he was indicating he did not want any possible liver and did it by setting criteria to accept only a very unlikely match.<\/p>\n
\u201cContextually he\u2019s saying he didn\u2019t want a liver,\u201d attorney Samy Khalil said. \u201cOur client has admitted it on the record that he did not want a liver.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The attorneys characterized the act as a medical decision and said the proper venue to dispute such decisions is a civil lawsuit, not a criminal indictment.<\/p>\n
Rosenthal again appeared to agree and stressed to the prosecutors their case needed to be about Bynon\u2019s alleged misrepresentations, and not about health care decisions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot allow this case to be tried as a medical malpractice case, as a bad manager case … because none of that is criminal,\u201d Rosenthal said.<\/p>\n
Restrictions on how prosecutors can describe Bynon and his patients<\/p>\n
The warning was just one of the limits placed on the prosecutors.<\/p>\n
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Rosenthal also said attorneys won\u2019t be allowed to refer to the people who were under\u00a0Bynon\u2019s care as \u201cvictims\u201d or to his acts as \u201clies\u201d or \u201cdeceptions.\u201d While some of Bynon\u2019s former colleagues at Memorial Hermann may be called to testify, they may be limited to telling the jury about the organ donation system, and not his management or personal behavior. \u00a0Elmilady in court said that Bynon operated with “unchecked power” at the hospital<\/p>\n
Bynon\u2019s attorneys have also challenged other expert witnesses who analyzed Bynon\u2019s actions on behalf of the government. One of the experts, transplant surgeon Matthew Cooper, wrote in his report that Bynon lacked a clinical basis for making changes to the UNet entries.<\/p>\n
Cooper\u2019s report also called Bynon\u2019s actions \u201creprehensible,\u201d according to court filings.<\/p>\n
Rosenthal has already said that Cooper\u2019s comments on morality won\u2019t be presented to a jury. In coming hearings, attorneys will question Cooper and other experts about their qualifications and conclusions before they\u2019re allowed to participate in the trial.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Rosenthal agreed to set a trial date for October. Attorneys said a trial could take up to three weeks to complete.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr. John Stevenson Bynon Jr., flanked by his attorney, Samy Khalil, exits federal court after his arraignment on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288872,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-412708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}