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is plagued by fatigue, he told us, but not by worse health problems—knock on wood. His disease, which began with a single blood draw, has led to many draws since, he explained, as his progress is monitored through tests of liver enzymes and other markers. “I’m fighting a dragon,” he said, and I first thought he’d chosen an apt metaphor for illness. Then I realized he meant his lawsuit. Like other former patients of Elaine Giorgi, Jerry had filed a civil suit against her former employer, SmithKline Beecham, which is part of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. A few weeks back they’d offered him a settlement of a few thousand dollars, which he refused. He told us he was hoping his case would go to trial within the year, though he wasn’t betting on it. Dragons are so good at dragging their feet. Regardless, today Jerry Orcoff’s stake in this whole awful mess was not financial but emotional. Today he wanted to see Elaine Giorgi brought to justice. He would have to wait for that, however, as would Steve and I. Right then, the deputy reemerged and explained that, due to some paperwork missing from a probation report, her sentencing had been postponed until August 15.

With a wave, Jerry said, “See you next month,” and strolled off.

The Santa Clara county prosecutor in charge of the case, Dale Sanderson, explained to me that Elaine Giorgi’s bizarre behavior—his words, not mine—went way beyond her boneheaded reuse of needles—my words, not his. For instance, he elaborated, a co-worker had caught her deliberately putting the wrong patient’s name on a vial of blood. Evidently Giorgi hadn’t taken enough blood from someone who’d already left the lab, which isn’t an uncommon mistake. It happens. But rather than calling the patient back in for another draw, Giorgi made up the difference using someone else’s blood. Although I was speaking with Sanderson on the phone, clearly he heard my jaw hit the floor. He was just as aghast. “I mean, can you imagine?” he exclaimed. “Can you imagine going in for your blood results and being told you have a disease that’s not even in your blood?” Or, say, your wife going out partying with friends because she’d been told she wasn’t pregnant when, come to find out, she was?

Giorgi then tried to cover up her mistake by changing the blood work requisition form that the second patient had brought in, so she could take the extra vial. Under the law, these actions, along with other violations she’d committed, were misdemeanors. But Deputy District Attorney Sanderson wanted a felony conviction and its stiffer penalty. Looking back three years to when he’d first received her case, he recalled, “I figured it would be very easy to show that someone who reused a needle puts the entire world at risk.” But that’s not how it turned out. Unable to find a corresponding law on the books, Sanderson thought back to a murder case he’d prosecuted in the late 1980s, “the first pit bull killing case,” in which the dog’s owner was charged with using a violent animal to commit assault. Sanderson believed this case showed a promising parallel to Giorgi’s reuse of potentially deadly needles. In addition, he “dusted off” a statute in the California Health and Safety Code regarding the illegal treatment or disposal of medical waste. Although no health care provider in California, to Sanderson’s knowledge, had ever been prosecuted under this statute, he felt sure he could use it to argue Giorgi’s culpability on multiple felony counts—that in reusing needles she was unlawfully “treating” biohazardous waste.

Sanderson’s strategy withstood the numerous legal hurdles of the preliminary hearings, he explained to me, but, just days before Giorgi’s trial was to begin, the California Supreme Court pulled a significant patch of rug out from under his feet. In its ruling on an unrelated case, the court narrowed the legal definition of the word likely (in the charge of “assault with a deadly weapon likely to cause great bodily injury”). This narrowing made it unlikely that Sanderson would get a conviction on Giorgi