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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk_case
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.
This could also not be a serial killer thing at all, and moreso be that the nurse was drugging patients to put them out. Which is still terrible, but not the same thing as intending to kill people even if some people died by malpractice of drugging them.
I would think if a nurse really wanted to be a serial killer and was a sole on-duty nurse there are probably slicker ways to have done so than using painkillers and sedatives that would turn up on an autopsy. Not to mention painkillers and sedatives arent really a surefire way to intentionally kill anybody, even if they can. But giving them in doses that are sure to stop someones breathing would also make them show up upon investigation quite clearly.
Sounds like this person was not a serial killer and was just drugging people to knock them out, which isnt necessarily intentionally lethal even if it can also kill. Realistically, as a palliative care nurse (even with him drugging people) some of them probably died more generally whether he happened to have drugged them or not. When dealing with people already dying I imagine it would be harder to concretely say he killed them without having massively overdosed them
Either way though, its certainly malpractice and people certainly died. So the verdict seems fair. He knew he was rolling the dice with their lives even if not trying to kill them
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.