SJC backs firing of medical examiner
Says missing body justifies action
Governor Deval Patrick had the authority to fire Dr. Mark A. Flomenbaum as the state's chief medical examiner last August after his office misplaced a body, the state's highest court affirmed yesterday.
The Supreme Judicial Court unanimously held that Patrick's firing of Flomenbaum was "not arbitrary or capricious," rejecting the forensic pathologist's contention that the dismissal breached a five-year contract he signed with the Romney administration in January 2005.
"The evidence before the governor sufficiently supports his determination that there were serious problems concerning the performance of the plaintiff's administrative and managerial duties," Justice John M. Greaney wrote on behalf of the court.
The high court said "the missing body situation and the plaintiff's mishandling of that situation" justified the firing of Flomenbaum, who had sued to get his job back.
Patrick sacked Flomenbaum after his office misplaced the body of a Cape Cod man in late April 2007; State Police later found the missing remains buried in another man's grave. Shortly after the Aug. 1 firing, a consulting firm hired by the state said Flomenbaum's office was on the "verge of collapse" from extreme mismanagement.
The high court pointed out that the Globe had reported in March 2007 that bodies were overflowing the storage areas at the office and being stacked in refrigerator trucks parked outside the building. The trucks were ordinarily reserved for holding disaster victims.
Terrel Harris - a spokesman for the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, which oversees the medical examiner's office - applauded the ruling.
"All we can really say is that we believe the decision was appropriate," he said.
Flomenbaum, 58, did not return phone calls. His lawyer, Thomas R. Kiley of Boston, said the ruling was unfortunate because his client was the best hope for fixing the office. The decision, he said, will also make it harder for Massachusetts to attract high-ranking state appointees because it will be easier for governors to fire them.
"I wouldn't characterize it as a big win for the governor," Kiley said. "I think the governor, the attorney general, the Commonwealth - they're all, in a sense, bigger losers today than Mark."
Attorney General Martha Coakley's office defended the Patrick administration in the suit.
Kiley said Flomenbaum is still living in the Boston area and working in academia, but he declined to give specifics.
Flomenbaum was recruited from the New York City medical examiner's office, where he had drawn widespread praise for his painstaking work after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.
Flomenbaum said in the suit that he uprooted his family from Connecticut to accept Governor Mitt Romney's offer and did so only after telling the administration it would take three to five years to fix the office. The office, the suit said, had endured years of underfunding and controversy, including an episode in which it sent the wrong set of eyeballs to an outside specialist for tests.
On May 3, 2007, Flomenbaum admitted that his office had lost a corpse that pathologists had examined days earlier. The Patrick administration immediately suspended Flomenbaum and fired him three months later.
After Flomenbaum's firing, Kevin M. Burke, Patrick's public safety secretary, called the medical examiner the worst public manager he had ever encountered.
But Dr. Elizabeth A. Bundock, whom Flomenbaum recruited as one of his assistants, said yesterday that Flomenbaum was a political scapegoat for Burke and other law enforcement officials who resisted his efforts to hire independent medical investigators.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.
