Lois Goodman was walking out of a hotel on her way to judge a US Open tennis match in New York in 2012 when police swept in to arrest her in front of news cameras. The charge was murder and the victim was her husband, Alan Goodman, who'd been found dead in their Los Angeles home four months earlier. It would be another four months before prosecutors dropped the charges. Six years later, Lois Goodman, 76, is still fighting to reclaim the reputation that was tarnished by the legal ordeal, reports the AP. Goodman goes to federal court Wednesday for trial in her lawsuit claiming a doctor at the LA coroner's office deprived her civil rights by falsifying her husband's autopsy report. She says Deputy Medical Examiner Yulai Wang didn't follow procedure when he changed the cause of death from an accident to a homicide without explanation.
Police said Goodman bludgeoned her husband with a coffee mug. Her lawyers said the legally blind 80-year-old tripped and fell down stairs at home while she was out on April 17, 2012. She returned home that evening to find him dead in bed. A shattered coffee mug was at the bottom of the stairs. The charges were dropped in December 2012 after Goodman passed a lie detector test and two other experts retained by prosecutors concluded the death was an accident. Goodman now wants the cause of death to be listed as an accident on the death certificate. She also wants $100,000 that she spent on lawyers, bail and other expenses as well as unspecified damages for the emotional toll. "The public humiliation is unending," her lawsuit states. Wang, who still works for the county coroner, has denied the allegations. Attorneys in the case are under a court order not to comment until a jury is seated. (More Lois Ann Goodman stories.)
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