Catharine Morton-Peters was the Chief Investigator for the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MFCU) of the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office at one time when she applied for and was given a warrant to search Affiliated Counseling Center (“ACC”), presumably to investigate ACC for medicare fraud.
The Fridley police executed the warrant on ACC and took patient files, including files of non-Medicaid patients.
Somewhere along the way files were lost or destroyed and ACC sued Ms. Morton-Peters.
The Minnesota Supreme Court accepted review in the case and they framed the issue presented as, “whether and under what circumstances prosecutorial immunity protects a person who is not a prosecutor.”
Doesn’t that way of framing the question answer itself? “Framing the question” is a critical weapon in the arsenal of rhetoric and persuasion. Congratulations to the plaintiff and counsel, John Degnan, Scott Flaherty, and Dan White, of Briggs & Morgan, who formulated the question in this way in their petition for review of the Court of Appeals decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court. (See footnote 7, here, in which the Court brushes off an alternative argument of Morton-Peters because it goes outside the narrow question before the Minnesota Supreme Court, as set forth by ACC.)