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I am a devotee of Boston Legal for a number of reasons, including my obsessive interest in Candice Bergen’s aging process (she was at Penn when I was, but she flunked out). Since she is about a year younger than I am, I also appreciate the fact that her character is depicted as a sexually active and sexually attractive woman with a horde of younger admirers.

At any rate, last night’s episode had Alan Shore (James Spader) and Denny Crane (William Shatner) take a road trip to New Orleans to defend a doctor on trial for allegedly euthanizing several patients during the terrible week following Katrina. The plot was based on the case of Dr. Anna Pou of Memorial Medical Center who has been indicted on similar charges.

First of all, when will the makers of movies and tv shows ever learn that New Orleanians do not have “southern” accents? I spent the whole hour cringing at the Mississippi syrup flowing out of the mouths of supposed native New Orleanians. (BTW New Orleanians also do not have “Cajun” accents and do not pepper their conversations with “Cher” either.)

As one might expect, there were lots of scenes of the French Quarter, open for business as usual, the New Orleans entertainment cliche. One scene showed dirty-old-man Denny in his hotel bed, surrounded by a cluster of young ladies of the evening who just “followed him home.” (Poker Maven, eat your heart out!) This scene, with the young ladies and Denny topsy-turvy on the bed, led to the episode’s chief insight: in New Orleans up is down. Whatever else the show got wrong, they got that right.

Inspired by that insight, Alan Shore’s closing argument referenced a recent NYTimes article (which I happened to have read) about the stress and trauma that African elephants are undergoing due to the negative impact of poaching and loss of habitat on traditional elephant social structures. The elephants are reacting to this stress by raping and murdering rhinos, clearly an appropriate metaphor for those of us who are struggling to survive Katrina. So now we know, a little rhino rape here and there is only to be expected from those who have endured the stress and trauma of Katrina.

Anyhow the doctor is acquitted, and my guess is that if ever Eddie Jordan brings Dr. Pou to trial (I think he would be a fool to do so), she will be, too. She has had the outspoken support of much of New Orleans’s medical community, and, if the comments on the Times-Picayune website are any indication, of much of the community at large. The only voices against her seem to be Charlie Foti, the once criminal sheriff of Orleans Parish and the incumbent attorney general of Louisiana, who is a whiz at generating self-aggrandizing publicity and who investigated the case (which wasn’t his business to do), and the families of the deceased who are under the delusion that their desperately ill relatives could have survived the horrible conditions if only they had been left alone.

The issue is whether it is murder to give dying patients sedation to relieve terrible suffering, knowing that it might hasten their deaths. Is that the same thing as euthanesia which is not legal in Louisiana? I personally don’t think so. I know that when I was in the throes of my heart attack in the Netherlands, I was asked for permission to have an injection of a clot-dissolving drug which carried a risk of causing a brain hemorrhage and almost immediate death. I was conscious and able to give informed consent, and I did. Knowing what I know now–that the clot-dissolving stuff doesn’t work and the proper treatment is an immediate angioplasty rather than screwing around wasting precious time with drugs–I would have said no. But would it have been murder if I had been unconscious and unable to give consent, and a decision had been made to try to save me with the drug anyway, and I had had the brain bleed and died? I would also say no. Dr. Pou had no illusions that the sedative injections might have some curative value. She was only trying to relieve unendurable suffering, and if the relief of suffering turned out to be the permanent kind, well, so be it.