Oral challenge leads to arrest during dental board meeting
COLUMBUS - A staid meeting of the Ohio State Dental Board was disrupted
yesterday when the State Highway Patrol arrested a lawyer after he refused to
stop arguing about the board's treatment of his client.
Quivering with rage, Board President Dr. Donald E. Demkee
repeatedly ordered Columbus lawyer Douglas E. Graff to sit down after refusing
his appeals to speak. When Graff refused, Demkee, an oral surgeon from Wooster,
asked a trooper to escort Graff from the room.
The lawyer refused to leave and was arrested. "You failed to
fulfill your duties!" Graff shouted as the trooper placed him in handcuffs.
Employees inside the Vern Riffe Center for Government and the Arts
gathered to watch as Graff was taken to the patrol's office to be processed on a
misdemeanor charge of disturbing a lawful meeting. He was later released and is
scheduled to appear March 1 in Franklin County Municipal Court.
Yesterday's disruption comes on the heels of a state
inspector general's report last week that was mildly critical of various
board procedures. |
The
report cited the board for two incidents that the inspector general said
constituted "an appearance of impropriety," but otherwise merely
suggested that the board address its "unhealthy office
atmosphere." Before his arrest, Graff sought permission to discuss a
disciplinary case involving Dr. Parneet S. Sohi, a pediatric dentist from
Cincinnati.
Sohi has been involved in a legal battle with the board since
November 1996, when his license was suspended for six months for allegedly
abusing children by putting them in headlocks and threatening them with needles
in an attempt to get them to cooperate.
Sohi vehemently denied the charges, which were based entirely on
the testimony of three former employees who said they witnessed the abuse. None
of the children or their parents were called to testify and only one of the
alleged victims' names was made known to Sohi, causing an appeals court in
Hamilton County to rule that the board had violated Sohi's due-process rights.
On that basis, the court had sent the case back to the board
yesterday to determine whether to impose the six-month suspension solely on the
case involving the |
patient who had been identified to Sohi. After Graff's
arrest, the board reaffirmed the suspension. Adding to the strangeness of yesterday's meeting was the fact that
the patient and his parents were sitting next to Sohi. Demkee also denied the
parents' request to tell the board that one of them was present every time Sohi
treated the boy and that no abuse occurred.
"That never happened," John Gibson said after the
meeting, referring to allegations that Sohi put Gibson's then-2-year-old son,
Alex, up against a wall and shook him. "If it had, he wouldn't have to
worry about the board because I would have taken care of him."
Fuming after Graff's arrest and the re-imposition of Sohi's
suspension, Gibson said: "You ever see such a railroad in your life?"
Sohi, who received an award from the American Dental Association in
1993 for his work on the detection and prevention of child abuse, was
distraught after the meeting.
"Their role is to protect the public," he said.
"This is suppression of the truth. ... The parents have told them again and
again (in letters and depositions) that this didn't happen." |
