Three male doctors face prison time for DNA fraud in connection with a paternity case in which they used their positions to influence a court decision.
The three doctors – who all work or have worked at the city hospital Rigshospitalet – all played a part in convincing a court to rule against a woman claiming that the main defendant was the father of her child.
“What’s happened is catastrophic,” Torben Goldin, the president of the Danish Court, told Metroxpress newspaper. “They have shaken one of the founding pillars of our society, which is trust in doctors.”
The case began in 2010 when the main defendant impregnated a woman and convinced a colleague to write a false medical statement documenting that he was too ill to take a DNA test at Rigshospitalet’s genetic department, as is standard procedure in paternity cases.
READ MORE: Hospital stands by tiny smoking area
Facing hard time
He then used the medical statement to instead have a false DNA sample taken at Herlev Hospital, where his other accomplice worked, which led to the city court ruling against the woman’s claims base on the fraudulent DNA evidence. But the woman appealed the decision to the national court.
“It ended with the main defendant having to take a DNA sample at the genetic department at Rigshospitalet, and the result showed that he was in fact the father,” the police prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen told Metroxpress.
All three defendants – who deny being guilty – have been charged with fraud and a number of other crimes that could add up to several years of prison time.
Furthermore, the police also want the two accomplice doctors to be stripped of their right to practise medicine.
