On Tuesday, an Argentine court confirmed that eight doctors will stand trial for their alleged roles in the death of football icon Diego Maradona.
Last year, the doctors were charged with “simple homicide with eventual intent,” with prosecutors claiming that the patient might still be alive if he had been treated appropriately. If proven guilty, they may face prison sentences ranging from 8 to 25 years.
Maradona died of a heart attack on November 25, 2020, at his house in Tigre, outside of Buenos Aires. Several weeks before his death, he had surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain.
In 2021, an investigator-appointed medical board found that the football star was in pain for 12 hours before his death and that the staff treating him was “plagued by irregularities and deficiencies.”
According to the Buenos Aires Herald, one of the main defendants in the case, neurosurgeon Leopoldo Luciano Luque, is accused of failing to perform “adequate follow-ups with controls and cardiological tests,” as well as having “systematically ignored and belittled the symptoms and signs compatible with heart failure that were reported to him,” among other things.
Maradona’s psychiatrist, psychologist, hospitalization coordinator, attending physician, nursing coordinator, and two nurses are all defendants.
According to Mario Baudry, a lawyer for the Maradona family, Maradona’s doctors “abandoned” him and “did nothing” to save his life.
Dalma Maradona, Maradona’s daughter, said on Instagram, “the process is painful and slow, but here we are and we will not stop until justice is done.”
For decades, the athlete battled a drug and alcohol addiction. “When I took cocaine, I became a zombie, and I was estranged from my family and society,” Maradona told TyC Sports in 2019.
Maradona captained Argentina’s national squad to World Cup victory in 1986. The goal he scored against England in the quarterfinals has been dubbed “the goal of the century.” Between 2008 and 2010, he was Argentina’s manager.
