Gallegos quoted on SART

◼ Telemedicine helps prosecute sexual assault cases

A little Eureka facility and a group of doctors a couple of hundred miles away are making a big difference in caring for Humboldt County's sexual assault victims and locking away their assailants.

A telemedicine facility set up at St. Joseph Hospital has been operating for about six years now, letting nationally recognized experts from the University of California at Davis sit in on local sexual assault exams. A study released in the medical journal “Pediatrics” last month found that telemedicine facilities, like Eureka's, greatly improve the quality of sexual assault examinations....

District Attorney Paul Gallegos said the use of telemedicine locally has been a great asset to his office, as it provides the examinations with immediate peer review and makes their findings carry much more weight in court.

”Peer review augments any potential challenges to the SART conclusions so they are less subject to attack,” Gallegos said. “When it's done, it improves the SART exam, which means it improves the case ... it means it has increased reliability for us, for the court and for those members of the community that serve on the jury.”...

Gallegos said the results simply speak for themselves.
”About every time we've used (evidence from telemedicine examinations) we've got a conviction,” he said....

Times-Standard staff writers John Driscoll, Sean Garmire, Thadeus Greenson, Jessie Faulkner, Erin Tracy and Sharon Letts contributed to this report. (Really? All of you guys?)

◼ interesting comments on this article ... same ones I would ask - do you think he really knows anything about what goes on at SART? had anything to do with any of this? (It's been there for 6 years, which goes back to when someone really did care about it), and WHAT CASES? Give examples. Just when I'm about to give up in exasperation, it's good to see that people do get it.

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