Anne Mitchell Acquitted By West Texas Jury After Less Than An Hour Deliberation

Well. What a day. Justice has prevailed in West Texas.

Well, a bit of justice has prevailed, in that Nurse Anne Mitchell has been acquitted by a West Texas jury in a bizarre case where the nurse had been arrested, accused and indicted for committing the imaginary crime of reporting a malpracticing doctor to the appropriate authorities.

Out of the Kermit Nurse Scandal many Kermit dirty deeds have been slithering to the surface, like rattlesnakes in the spring. The Kermit Nurse Scandal may be setting in motion the cleaning up of what, apparently, has long been a really creepy town.

The ridiculous trial part of Nurse Anne Mitchell's Kermit ordeal is over. But that does not mean she is whole. As in restored to her pre, damaged by Dr. Arafiles and Kermit, state.

Anne Mitchell and her fellow victim, Nurse Vickilyn Galle, have civil lawsuits pending in federal court against Winkler county, the Kermit hospital, Dr. Arafiles and various officials, including, I would hope, the obviously corrupt sheriff who worked in cahoots with the malpracticing doctor to have the good nurses arrested. Nurses Mitchell and Galle charge that their firing and indictment violated their 1st Amendment rights and their right to due process.

I love the way America works. When it works the way it is intended to.

Congrats to Nurse Anne Mitchell and those who fought to do the right thing. And the jury.

And now it is time to fire and possibly indict a Kermit sheriff, named Robert L. Roberts. He needs to face jail time via an indictment and a conviction.

I love poetic justice. Oh, I forgot to mention, there is a doctor in Kermit who needs to have his license to practice medicine taken away. Last name Arafiles. He should be easy to locate.

Kermit Texas Nurse Faces 10 Prison Years For Reporting Doctor's Malpractice

There is a whole lotta crazy that goes on in Texas. I've mentioned before that the zone I live in takes on Orwellian aspects at times, what with all the double-speak from various Texas state agencies that are supposed to be protecting the people and the environment.

But it's not just my zone of Texas. A whole lotta crazy comes out of this little town in far West Texas, called Kermit.

Gar the Texan is from Kermit. That's one example. Sheriff Robert L. Roberts Jr., that's him in the picture, is another example of crazy coming out of Kermit.

There is this medical thing called the Hippocratic Oath, that's an oath medical type people take in which they pledge, among other things, to do no harm to patients.

Well, the Hippocratic Oath has been turned upside down in Kermit. A doctor in Kermit, Rolando G. Arafiles Jr., was doing bad things, like doing a skin graft, that failed, in an emergency room where he did not have surgical privileges. Another time Arafiles sutured a rubber tip to a patient's finger, an unorthodox procedure which was deemed inappropriate by the Texas Department of State Health Services.

A nurse, Anne Mitchell, had seen enough of what she believed to be Arafiles' bad medicine. She and a fellow nurse, Vickilyn Galle, sent a letter detailing the bad medicine they had witnessed, to state regulators.

That letter set in motion a bizarre chain of events that now has the good nurse indicted, facing 10 years in prison, for being true to the Hippocratic Oath. Nurse Mitchell is set to stand trial in state court on Monday for "misuse of official information." Whatever that is, it is a 3rd-degree felony in Texas.

The state prosecutor claims he will show that Nurse Mitchell had a history of making inflammatory statements about Dr. Arafiles, intending to damage his reputation, when she reported him to the Texas Medical Board, last April.

Nurse Mitchell, on the other hand, she being a voice of sanity in the troubled town of Kermit, said she had a professional obligation to protect patients from what she saw was a pattern of improper prescribing and surgical procedures.

Charges were dropped against co-letter writer, Nurse Galle.

When the medical board told Dr. Arafiles about the anonymous complaint, he complained to a friend that he was being harassed by a pair of nurses. Arafiles' friend happened to be Winkler County Sheriff, Robert L. Roberts Jr., who credits Arafiles with saving his life, after a heart attack.

Sheriff Roberts showed his appreciation of the bad doctor's good work, in his case, by obtaining a search warrant to seize the 2 nurses' work computers, where he found the evidence of their crime. That being the whistle blowing letter their consciences told them to write, which they felt they were free to do, living, as they do, or so they thought, in the land of the free.

No one had told the nurses they were not living in the land of the free, they were living in Orwellian Texas. It's a totally different country from the rest of America.

Obviously, this has been an extremely twisted nightmare that has been visited upon these nurses. State and national nurses associations have raised over $40,000 for the defense. Legal experts, operating outside of the Malice in Blunderland zone, say Nurse Mitchell would seem to be protected by Texas whistle-blower laws.

The nurses' lawyers have filled a civil suit in federal court charging the county, hospital, sheriff, doctor and prosecutor with vindictive prosecution and denial of the nurses' First Amendment free speech rights.

Nurse Mitchell's co-conspirator, Nurse Galle, said, "We're just in disbelief that you could be arrested for doing something you had been told your whole career was an obligation."

Nurse Galle, it's not just you and Nurse Mitchell who are shaking their heads in disbelief, heads are shaking in disbelief all over America and the world, over the latest scary stuff to come out of Texas, that common sense would seem to dictate would, should never happen.

But, somehow does.

UPDATE: Video of Dr. Arafiles. Watch it and ask yourself if you want him operating on you.

UPDATE: Read the Texas Medical Board document regarding 2007 malpractice charges against Kermit Dr. Arafiles.