Well, it's been 3 years... (just photo in link... no recent video made public)
Three years after being declared brain dead following an ill-fated throat surgery at Children’s Hospital in Oakland and subsequently kept on life support, Jahi McMath continues to occupy a central role in the legal and philosophical debate over when a family should remove a loved one from life support.
In the latest twist to the drama, a well-known neurologist has reviewed videos of McMath and says they prove she’s still alive after all, even if her brain is not functioning as it should. McMath’s family quietly moved her from the Oakland hospital in 2014, insisting that the diagnosis of being brain dead did not necessarily mean the girl was actually deceased, and she’s remained connected to a ventilator in an undisclosed location in New Jersey ever since.
As the girl’s family continues its legal battle to have her declaration of death overturned as they proceed with a lawsuit, the new finding by Dr. Alan Shewmon, a professor emeritus of pediatrics and neurology at UCLA, could help bolster the McMath family’s case. Shewmon, who is a longtime critic of the standards used to determine when someone is brain dead, reached his decision after studying 49 videos of the girl recorded by her relatives from March 2014 to April 2016. In
a court document filed June 29 in Alameda County Superior Court, Shewmon declares that the videos show McMath is actually alive and that her condition is even improving with time.
“The video recordings, as crude and unsystematic as they are,” he wrote, “represent the only way at present to decide whether Jahi is permanently comatose or in a minimally conscious state with intermittent responsiveness.”
The documents say that McMath seems to move her extremities when nudged by simple commands. And while the girl remains irrevocably and severely neurologically disabled after the surgery, Shewmon says she is not brain dead.
“Jahi’s subsequent course defied all predictions of what must happen to dead bodies maintained indefinitely on ventilators,” Shewmon said in his reported filed in the court case. “Jahi McMath is a living, severely disabled young lady, who currently fulfills neither the standard diagnostic guidelines for brain death nor California’s statutory definition of death.”
Shewmon says that the videos were reviewed by forensic experts who found no evidence of post-recording alternations. Some of the girl’s movements in response to commands lasted as long as 10 seconds, he wrote, especially when her heartbeat was above 80. He notes that in some of the videos the girl responds accordingly when the mother asks her to move, say, her right arm and the “move it harder.” At one point, the mom asks her which is the ”bad finger,” or the ”f-you finger,” and the girl raises her middle finger.
“There is a very strong correspondence between between the body part requested,” he wrote, “and the next body part that moves. This cannot reasonably be explained by chance.”
McMath’s tragedy has become another in a series of dramatic and controversial cases here and abroad that illustrate the fierce bioethical debate raging around the very definition of death by the medical community and how family members choose to deal with such a finding. In McMath’s case, her parents considered the ventilator as life support, while her doctors viewed the measure to be a futile treatment of a deceased person.
http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/07/24/expert-videos-show-jahi-mcmath-is-alive-getting-better/