Posted on 07/19/2006 7:53:58 PM PDT by catholicfreeper
NEW ORLEANS, United States (AFP) - US investigators have charged a doctor and two nurses with murder in the deaths of four patients in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, officials said.
"We're talking about people that pretended maybe they were God and they made that decision," Louisiana attorney general Charles Foti said at a press conference in the state capitol of Baton Rouge.
"This is not euthanasia. This is a homicide."
The affidavit charged that the three gave lethal doses of morphine and another drug to patients at Memorial Medical Center who were deemed too sick to be evacuated three days after the hurricane devastated New Orleans on August 29.
Two of the victims were in their 90s and two were in their 60s, including a 380-pound man who was described as "alert" but paralyzed.
Doctor Anna Pou, 50, and nurses Cheri Landry, 49, and Lori Budo, 43, were charged with four counts of second-degree murder. They were released on bail to await formal arraignment.
The charges followed an investigation launched after rumors circulated that medical staff had euthanized patients whom they thought would not survive the harsh conditions that followed Katrina, including lack of food, drinking water and air conditioning.
The attorney general's office investigated 13 nursing homes and five hospitals throughout the region but found credible evidence of mercy killings at only one.
Four hospital administrators at Memorial Medical Center heard of plans to give patients lethal doses, although none of the key witnesses said they knew who made the decision, the affidavit said.
During a meeting about the evacuation plan, one hospital administrator who has not been charged told employees they did not expect to evacuate nine critically ill patients.
She also said the plan was they "were not going to leave any living patients behind."
Pou later told a hospital worker that many of the patients on the seventh floor "were probably not going to survive" and that "a decision had been made to administer lethal doses," the affidavit said.
At least one patient was "aware, conscious and alert, but he weighed 380 pounds and was paralyzed. Dr Pou decided that (he) could not be evacuated... and that they didn't have a lot of time and that she needed to clear the floors as soon as they could," the affidavit said.
Court documents show that the killings were not done in secret.
Budo was observed giving an injection to a 92-year-old man who said, "That burns," as she administered a lethal dose of morphine.
The attorney general said that more charges could be laid in the case, and that more victims might be found among the 45 bodies recovered from the hospital -- 11 of which were already in the morgue when the storm hit.
He also said he believed the patients "would have lived through it" if Pou and the nurses had not taken "the law into their own hands."
But Pou's lawyer said the attorney general was more interested in staging a "media event" for political gain than in pursing justice.
"It's a year later and the blame game is now shifting to a doctor and two nurses and maybe others," Rick Simmons said at a press conference in New Orleans.
"They're victims of the storm not victims of homicide... There's no criminal misconduct."
Simmons said Pou - who was arrested in her hospital scrubs - would plead not guilty to the charges.
Most of New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina, which killed as many as 1,500 people across the Gulf Coast. Much of the city was without power, water or transportation.
Emergency generators in the city's hospitals quickly ran out of fuel and hospital staff used flashlights to tend to patients in the sweltering heat and stench of backed-up sewage.
Outside, the city descended into chaos and evacuations were stymied by reports of snipers shooting at medical helicopters.
The decision to impose murder charges does not sufficiently address the issue of motive and the complex ethical questions underlying the situation, University of New Orleans criminologist Peter Scharf told AFP.
"This is a case that involves a clash possibly between moral duty and legal duty," he said.
"The issue that escapes discussion in the action of the attorney general is ... what are your duties in that kind of situation? Were these acts of conscience or acts of crime?"
I am going to post some in the blog section later but this page has a lot of sources and articles on waht happened inclusing the bio of the poeple arrested
http://www.thedeadpelican.com/
When I owned a home health and hospice in TN, this was part of orientation as well as the written policies that every nurse had to become familiar with.
Even if it means the patient drowns or dies of heatstoke, or starves, you don't take his life. You do your best to help him, and if that is insufficient, then you've done your best.
It's part of the hippocratic oath that every doctor takes or at least used to take. The classical version read, "I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect."
The modern version reads "But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God."
Thanks. But I'm actually familiar. If I wasn't off to bed now, I would repost an email from a doctor that went through the hurricane.
I know it is in backhoe's Katrina link list...somewhere.
Check out my post #21. Is that the email you're referring to?
Thanks Hildy. No, this was an email of mine.
Huh, I can't believe I found it.
http://209.157.64.201/focus/f-news/1475310/posts
Personal Email Excerpt About Prisoner Transfer Due to Katrina
This is from a doctor in Louisiana. He worked a clinic and at a prison.
Just a little on the seen insight to show a perception.
Now I'm really off to bed.
there's three kinds of employees....those that are important, those that are essential ,and those that are both important, and essential....
the doctors and nurses were both important and essential.....they didn't run tail.....
I am certainly not defending the choice, but the real heroes of Katrina are those that stayed and worked ...not the accountants, nor the bankers nor the administrators, the schools were closed .....
but the doctors and nurses showed up and stayed......
I'd like to see the Foti's of the world clean up a strangers diarrhea and urine and vomit all the while working in the dark with limited supplies and in sweltering conditions......
Oh I realize that. But this is not a situation of triage though. This is a situation I think if porven of direct Euthanasia. Also it s not clear to me if this just wasnt the result of people that had lost their minds and were pancking a bit
nurses are generally not strong men.....
and it would be nice to count on some strong policemen but I understand that huge numbers of them just deserted their jobs, and others of them were robbing stores themselves...
and then they got free trips to Vegas...wonder what the nurses and doctors who cared for the sick got?....
and not to even mention what a nearly 400 pound man , dead weight , would do to ones back and neck as you "carry" him downstairs....
I'll bet you never tried that , now did you....
Hospitals normally have orderlies that ARE strong men. They do things like help turn and move 600 lb patients like this so the nurses don't have to.
No one should try to carry a 600 lb person down stairs by themselves, and I wasn't suggesting that. You need multiple people. Strap him to a bed and move him down like furniture movers do.
And if they had let the orderlies go, then then they wait for the military. "Can't evacuate him" is not an acceptable excuse.
They are being harmed if their death is hastened even to avoid suffering. Medical Professionals aren't God so they can't know with certainty that the patient is going to die anyway. It's not their place to speed it up. These patients all had reasonable chances and none should have been killed. But regardless, they did not have the right as medical professionals to decide to end these patients lives, even to avoid suffering. There are drugs to control suffering.
On the contrary, such pressure is how the character of man is truly tested.
No, you would not know well targeted sarcasm if it fell with a grand piano on your head.
This is a story from the uk paper the Daily Mail published on Sept 11 2005
by C AROLINE GRAHAM and JO KNOWSLEY,
Mail on Sunday 09:01am 11th September 2005
Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.
In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.
Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."
Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.
Their families believe their confessions are an indictment of the appalling failure of American authorities to help those in desperate need after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands of lives and making 500,000 homeless.
'These people were going to die anyway'
The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.
"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."
The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: "This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.
"I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process.
"We divided patients into three categories: those who were traumatised but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying.
"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second.
"It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.
"There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing.
"Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible.
"The pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand these people were going to die anyway."
Mr McQueen, a utility manager for the town of Abita Springs, half an hour north of New Orleans, told relatives that patients had been 'put down', saying: "They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died."
Mr McQueen has been working closely with emergency teams and added: "They had to make unbearable decisions
It is apparent to me the rumor mill of wild gangs taking control played a part in this. The radio station was reporting attacks on hospital that turned out never to have happened
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.