John Henries was angry when he heard the news. An OB-GYN named Thomas J. Byrne was practicing in New York again.
“That’s very wrong,” Henries told Gothamist. “I was lied to. I think everyone who was involved in that case was lied to.”
Decades ago, Byrne had been stripped of his medical license in New York due in part to his failure to provide adequate medical care when delivering Henries’ son, Matthew, who was born in 1989 in a small upstate town near Rochester.
Matthew was one of five babies whose births were examined by the New York health department in the early 1990s as part of a state investigation into Byrne’s work as a physician. Three of those infants had died shortly after they were born.
The state health commissioner labeled Byrne an “imminent danger” to patients in 1990. A year later he was found guilty of negligence and incompetence, among other charges, and stripped of his New York medical license.
After that decision became public, a health department spokesperson told the Democrat & Chronicle newspaper that it would be “very difficult” for Byrne to have his New York license restored. But in 2014, the state’s Board of Regents, which handles licensing decisions, did exactly that.
“It just makes me mad that he could do that and get away with it,” Henries said.
A five-part Gothamist investigation has been exploring how doctors like Byrne can lose their license in one state and continue to practice in others, even as they face additional malpractice lawsuits from patients. Part of the problem is a…
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