Columnist Susan Snyder: Courts are blind to Duke’s case

Saturday, Sept. 30, 2000 | 2:36 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

All Anya Duke really wanted was her day in court.

She already has maneuvered through nine years of motions, stipulations and postponements in a legal system that seems focused on figuring out who can last the longest, rather than who is right.

She has drained her finances, expended the services of five lawyers and has been to the end of her emotional rope and back.

But all the lawyers, money, paperwork and years haven't been able to give the 62-year-old woman either of the things she wants most -- her eyesight or the chance to explain to a jury how she lost it.

On Aug. 9, the day finally set for Duke's trial, District Court Judge Nancy Saitta dismissed Duke's complaint against a doctor Duke claims misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated an injury to her right eye in 1991.

Because of motions to dismiss certain facts that were successfully presented by the physician's attorney during previous hearings, most of what Duke wanted to say in her opening arguments wasn't admissible.

She wasn't allowed to say she is blind. Jurors weren't allowed to see the special machine Duke uses to read. Her husband, Jim, had to cover it with black cardboard. She wasn't allowed to mention being disabled or ill.

She wanted to tell jurors that the injury occurred when one of her dogs bumped her eye and that she went to a specialist for a diagnostic ultrasound. Instead, he performed an experimental gas bubble treatment that went horribly wrong within hours. He refused to see her that evening, citing his daughter's birthday party. By the next day it was too late.

But Duke never got to tell anyone that story. She was representing herself because she had run out of money and Las Vegas had run out of lawyers willing to take the case. With so much evidence stricken from use, no one would touch it, Duke says.

She was allowed to say only what had been deemed legally acceptable, truth be damned. She figures no one will ever know what the truth is now.

"I felt that I was choked there in the court," Duke said. "Everything coming out of my mouth was controlled."

Duke is no whiner. Her voice cracks with emotion when she speaks, but whose wouldn't after nearly a decade of daily frustrations?

Her husband calls her a fighter.

"This is the most courageous person I've ever met, and I've met some pretty brave people" says Jim Duke, a retired U.S. Green Beret.

Anya Duke was born in Ukraine. She escaped the Gestapo with her family during World War II and met Jim years later while teaching languages to U.S. servicemen in Germany.

She speaks seven languages, but says English isn't her best one. It added one more obstacle to the difficult task of representing herself. "The court doesn't want to deal with plain people. They want to deal with attorneys," Duke said.

This time the attorneys won. Duke has filed an appeal in hopes her case will one day be heard by a three-judge panel. But as the loser in this round she now faces paying $350,000 of her former physician's legal costs.

All Anya Duke really wanted was her day in court.

And she's not going to get it.