No doubt Doctor Thomas will be ordered to bend over and assume the position after this!

State had a good day yesterday, but seems to be struggling again today

She was supposed to testify that fentanyl overdose is not plausible in this case

Nelson: So again, just kind of taking into consideration, removing certain variables, right, you find a person at home, no struggle with the police, right, and the person doesn’t have a heart problem, yet you find fentanyl and methamphetamine in this person’s system at the levels they are, would you certify this as an overdose ?

Dr. Thomas: Again, in the absence of any of these other realities, yes, I could consider that to be an overdose.

Nelson: And the level of fentanyl in a person — again, in this hypothetical scenario — there are deaths certified as drug overdoses significantly lower than 11 nanograms per milliliter ?

Dr. Thomas: Lower, higher. it’s got a huge range, yes.

Nelson: As low, I believe, as three percent or three nanograms per milliliter?

Dr. Thomas: Yes.

Nelson: So the ingestion of drugs is unique to that individual’s body, right?

Dr. Thomas: Right.

Nelson: I have no further questions.

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Earlier testimony from at least two of the states medical experts suggested that Fentanyl would not be a possible reason for death in the case of Floyd:

• Doctor "vital signs" suggested that it was impossible to conclude that he had died from an overdose based an a whole slew of variables he observed. 
• Meanwhile Doctor "charts and graphs" suggested that the levels were too low to have been a fentanyl overdose?

Now the graph provided by the doctor (whose real name is Isenschmit) and touted as proof positive that Floyd did not have enough drugs in his system to kill him is relying on his apparently belief that the jury is clueless as to how to read a chart or what the various averages mean. 

In this case, the number to look at is the median number of 10.00 ng/ml. What that tells us is the half of all Fentanyl deaths occur with 10 ng/ml or less. Floyd had 11 ng/ml as well as other drugs in his system. People have died from as little as 2-3 ng/ml. 

The mean (taking the sum of ng/ml and dividing by the number of cases) can quite obviously be skewed by people who took extremely large amount of Fentanyl and then died. There is no way to prove that it took "exactly" that much to kill them, or if they would have died even with far less in their system. 

Example: 

• Person one took three pills and died with 3 ng/ml 
• Person two took seven pills and died with 7 ng/ml
• Person three took ten pill and died with 10 ng/ml
• Person three took fifteen pills and died with 15 ng/ml
• Person four accidently swallow a hundred pills and died with 100 ng/ml

The median in this case would be 10. Meaning it is exactly in the middle. Half died with less and half died with more. But the mean becomes 27 ng/ml because of the one person who accidently swallowed 100 pills. Now obviously someone doesn't accidently swallow 100 pills, but the point remains. We know it didn't really take 100 pills to kill that person, so saying the average amount of Fentanyl needed to kill someone is 27 is not accurate. Everyone else but this one person died from 15 ng/ml or less. 

So I would guess that the mean would be wildly skews higher because the unlikely nature the someone would be taking "exactly" the amount of Fentanyl needed for them to overdose. I would assume that almost everyone takes over that amount. In fact, even the median is likely skewed higher, albeit by a smaller margin.

 

At the end of the day, the theory of a drug overdose lives on. When the defense gets their chance, I am sure they will provide their own experts to push that theory to even higher levels of credibility.