Question about sending a medical patient to jail?

Question

Hi, I'm doing a research for a screenplay I'm writing in which the protagonist bribes a medical staff not to send his brother, who overdosed from illegal substances, to jail.

I would like to know who this "staff" would/could be and how long OD patients would take to recover and be released.

Answer 1

As soon as he is out of danger of dying, he is off to Jail. You cannot bribe the whole system, and that is what it would take to keep a patient a long time.

A senior staff man can keep a patient in longer that usual, but it is hard to bribe a Physician.  If you handed me enough to retire and live in luxury for the rest of my life, I would not go for it. Happen to like Medicine, don't like jail or disgrace.

Even if someone was able to keep him for several days, he would be picked up as soon as he was released, so what was gained?

Answer 2

A patient who was unstable would not be released from the hospital.  For your purposes, "unstable" would probably mean either not breathing on his own, blood pressure or heart rate that was not being adequately modulated without drugs, or some kind of reaction from the drug not having worn off yet (and the need for supportive care until it does).

What the specifics would be, including how long it could take, would depend on what the drug is supposed to be and what the symptoms of the OD were.  Bribing a doctor, and it would have to be a doctor releasing the patient or saying he couldn't be released, wouldn't keep the brother from being under arrest, though--the cops will stay right there in the room with him, or right outside the door, until he's stable enough to transport (and they do have hospital wings in jails).  In other words, the only thing the physician would have any control over is, in the short term, arguing that the patient is not well enough to be moved.

Good luck!

ETA:  Well, let's see.  Technically, these things are unlikely no matter where you are, but it's your story, so if you wanted to postulate that you had a very politically-connected doctor who could somehow claim that the patient had died or could fake the death, you could try and go down that road.  You could also create a sympathetic medical staff that wants to fool the police, eliminating the need for a bribe.  You could have, say, a long-term coma patient replacing the brother and the medical staff correctly stating that this person will never recover.  

I would say that the ability to bribe anyone, police or medical staff, depends a lot on how much they have to lose and how badly they want the brother, and what for.  So depending on your story, if what you want is just to delay the brother's being taken to jail for a few days (so the protagonist can perhaps find evidence to clear him of whatever the charges are), the medicos could do that.  If you want the charges dropped entirely, I would think that would depend on the police.

I can come up with this stuff all day, but it does depend on the scenario.  *g*