“Could an elderly physician with severely restricted hand mobility make such a mistake with a simple injection, Dr. Phillips?”

“Of course. Even young physicians with healthy hands miss veins, or punch through them. Especially veins that have been worn out by toxic chemotherapy agents.”

“Do physicians under great stress tend to make more mistakes than those who are not?”

“The statistics support that. But physicians are trained to operate under stressful conditions. That’s the nature of the job.”

“What if the stress were psychological and deeply personal? Unrelated to the job?”

“Severe stress of that type would increase the odds of making a mistake for any physician, as it would for any professional attempting to do his job.”

“But Dr. Cage would have seen that the morphine was not killing his patient, would he not?”

“If he stayed at the scene. Did he stay at the scene?”

“Let me ask the questions, Dr. Phillips. Would it have been to Dr. Cage’s advantage to stay at the scene? If his goal was to murder the patient and not be found out?”

“Well, of course. If he had stayed at the scene, then Mrs. Turner would have died under a doctor’s care. No autopsy would have been required. If he wanted to kill her, or murder her, he’d have been home free. Unless the family raised a stink.”

The question of whether or not Dad was present at Viola’s house during her death comprises the central hole in Shad’s case, and to my knowledge, no evidence proves that he was. The idea that Quentin would let this kind of leading questioning proceed without objecting is simply beyond me.

“How long after the botched morphine injection would it have taken for a doctor at the scene to realize the drug was not killing his patient?”

“That’s hard to say. It depends on a lot of factors, and a patient’s morphine tolerance can’t be determined after death.”

“Can you make an educated guess?”

“Between ten and thirty minutes. With as little morphine as got into her bloodstream, Mrs. Turner might have remained conscious the whole time, or she might have awakened after only a few minutes of sedation.”

“All right. Why would a doctor administer adrenaline after seeing that the morphine was not having its intended effect? Would he do it to resuscitate her? To try to bring her back to life?”

This question is improper on so many grounds that I wouldn’t know where to begin to object. Shad is obviously implying to the jury that Dad injected the adrenaline, when he has presented no evidence that he did so. Yet Quentin does not object!