A palliative care nurse in Germany has been sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted of the murder of 10 patients and the attempted murder of 27 others.
Prosecutors alleged that the man, who has not been publicly named, injected his mostly elderly patients with painkillers or sedatives in an effort to ease his workload during shifts overnight.
Where I live (Philly suburb) there was an incident where a guy driving a 12,000 gallon gasoline truck pumped out 4000 gallons at his first gas station stop and then decided he just wanted to go home rather than making the rest of his deliveries. So he ran the hose to the back of the station and dumped the other 8000 gallons onto the ground. This happened to be right above a creek and about 200 feet from an elementary school.
It just doesn’t make any sense how anybody could be this stupid. He got 20 years in prison for it or something like that. He certainly deserved it, but meanwhile executives who manage to create far worse disasters never see a day in jail.
The article does not mention the evidence basis, so I will keep my comment general. In the Netherlands similar accusations were made against Lucia de Berk, the evidence was based on opinions of superiors and colleagues plus the statistical unlikelihood of so many patients dying under her supervision. But crucially there was never any direct evidence that she deliberately killed patients, and in the end it turned out that she didn’t. She was particularly unliked by her colleagues because she was a sex worker in the past and that is why she was given the worst shifts (and coincidentally the shifts where more patients die). In the end her life was ruined by her colleagues and the judiciary system not understanding statistics (5 percent of all nurses have a statistically-significant high death rate). Again this case could be a real psychopath but the fact that they don’t mention the evidence basis makes me think of Lucia de Berk.
the judiciary system not understanding statistics (5 percent of all nurses have a statistically-significant high death rate).
And for those in this thread who also don’t understand statistics, that’s because the threshold for statistical significance is usually 5% by definition and has nothing to do with nursing at all.
There’s a former nurse here in the UK called Lucy Letby who’s currently in prison for murdering several babies and attempting to kill more. There’s a campaign to get her released based on basically 3 strands.
The first is the fact that there’s no actual evidence that any of the deaths were not of natural causes. The second is the statistical argument. The third is that the police enlisted the help of people who worked with Letby to assess the evidence. As one person put it “how can any fair investigation be even partially carried out by people who the police should actually be treating as potential suspects?”
I have no ideas whether or not she’s guilty, but since i had previously heard of cases like the one you describe I’m definitely of the opinion that there should be a retrial.
