Florida Doctor Criminally Indicted for Removing Patient's Liver Instead of Spleen — Patient Died

The Doctor Who Removed the Wrong Organ and Faced a Grand Jury

A Florida surgeon was criminally indicted after allegedly removing a patient's liver rather than the spleen during a routine splenectomy. The patient died. The indictment — not a civil malpractice suit, but a criminal charge — is the institutional signal that prosecutors believe this was not a correctable error but a chargeable act.

The Receipt

NBC News reported the indictment in April 2026, identifying the physician and the Florida state charges. A splenectomy and a hepatectomy require operating on opposite sides of the abdominal cavity on anatomically distinct organs. The liver is not the spleen. The gap between those two procedures is not a technical ambiguity — it is a fundamental surgical orientation failure. The patient's death is documented in the post-operative record.

What It Proves

Wrong-organ and wrong-site surgeries are classified as "never events" by the Joint Commission precisely because they should be impossible under standard surgical verification protocols. They are also notoriously underreported: hospitals self-report to state health departments with minimal enforcement consequences. Criminal indictment breaks that pattern. It means a grand jury reviewed the evidence and concluded the ordinary accountability pipeline — hospital review, state licensing boards, civil litigation — was insufficient for what occurred here.