![]() A few decades ago, administering anesthesia was one of the most dangerous medical procedures, and had a mortality rate of about one in ten thousand. In asking this question, Ferman was following a procedure alien to the justice system but entrenched in the health-care and transportation industries. What factors, she wondered, had caused competent people to make bad choices? “These were skilled professionals,” she told me, who had not set out to sabotage their case. Instead, Ferman did things differently: rather than find a culprit to blame, she held a series of meetings to discover the organizational errors that had led to the mistake. would fire the responsible parties and announce that she had cleaned house. A newspaper called the incident a “fiasco.” She and her staff had plenty of evidence that Kerns had committed a sexual assault, but, because the drugging was written into the indictment, they had to drop charges and refer the case to the Commonwealth’s Attorney General’s office. “It was a huge embarrassment,” Risa Ferman, Montgomery County’s district attorney, told me. Kerns’s lawyer got in touch with the prosecuting attorneys, who were horrified to realize that they had misinterpreted the findings-a rookie mistake. Although the word “Zolpidem” appeared, what the document indicated was that the test had detected "less than" five nanograms per milliliter, which in this case was zero. Several months later, a toxicologist hired by Kerns’s defense took a closer look at the lab report. Prosecutors secured a grand-jury indictment on more than a dozen criminal counts, including rape and aggravated indecent assault. A key piece of evidence was a urine test apparently showing the presence of Zolpidem, commonly known as Ambien. ![]() Hospital reports showed bruising consistent with a sexual assault, and DNA on the woman’s underwear was consistent with Kerns’s profile. Along the way, she said, he gave her wine and raped her in his Mercedes, and then again in her home. The woman said that Kerns had offered her a ride after an alcohol-fuelled office party. Kerns, had been accused of rape by a woman who worked at his law firm. The chairman of the county’s Republican Party, Robert J. Last year, the district attorney’s office in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, blew a case.
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