The report card for each state contains the scores it received when we evaluated it for how well it protects patients against sexually abusive doctors. The overall rating is the average of the score the state received in each category. In states with two medical boards, one for osteopathic physicians and the other for medical doctors, the overall rating is based on an average of each board’s scores.
Click on the boxes below to read how District of Columbia did on each category — and how we calculated the score for the categories.
State rating (out of 100)
In 2013, the D.C. medical board granted a license to King. The neurologist had surrendered his license to practice in South Dakota in 2006 after admitting to an improper relationship with a patient. The following year he pleaded no contest to a single count of sexual penetration by a psychotherapist.
Other physicians and former patients wrote letters of support for the doctor. The judge suspended imposition of the sentence, allowing King to be granted a clean record after completing 10 years on probation.
At the sentencing hearing in South Dakota, Judge Glen W. Eng said, “I understand that the decision that the court makes today impacts you. But I think it also impacts society. Society is saying that we cannot have people who are vulnerable, who because of their psychological situation, be placed in a position where they place trust on a person professionally and are then taken advantage of.”
King's original license to practice medicine in D.C. was granted in 1998 and expired at the end of 2002.
Noting the South Dakota case in King's 2013 reinstatement order, the D.C. board set conditions that included taking additional training on physician-patient boundaries and submitting to monitoring by a board-approved supervisory physician for at least a year.
The board terminated that order in 2015, ruling its terms and conditions had been satisfied. King's D.C. license is listed as active.
Reached by phone, King declined to comment.
The board will not accept anonymous complaints. However, the board, on its own motion, can ask its director to investigate a doctor based on information from an individual who doesn't file a signed complaint. The board's website advises that complaints are made available to the doctors in question, so they can respond to the allegations.
“He used his position to prey upon the most vulnerable population – inmates – and sexually abuse these men.”
—Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter V. Taylor, commenting on the sentencing of Dr. Lewis Jackson. The physician sexually abused a prisoner at the D.C. Jail in 2008 and several prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta in 2011. His D.C. license was revoked and he surrendered his Georgia license.
Doctors can be sanctioned for sexual contact with a former patient, even if the relationship appears to be consensual, when the patient may still be vulnerable because of the power imbalance between doctors and patients and when sexual contact is likely to have an adverse impact on the patient.
Click here to find your state!