Today’s rant is going to pick up on a story I mentioned in Where Do We Go From Here?, and that’s the story that Morley Safer reported called Katrina Doc Denies Mercy Killings, which appeared on the September 24 edition of 60 Minutes.
The story revolves around allegations that Dr. Anna Pou and nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo murdered four patients at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans days after Hurricane Katrina had laid waste to the Big Easy and a four-hundred mile wide swath of the southern United States.
In the aftermath of the storm the hospital lost all power. After the levees broke it became flooded with 10 feet of water. Supplies — food, medicine and basic medical materials — became very limited very quickly, and the heat within the hospital reached unbearable temperatures — temperatures as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit.
All around, the whole city looked like a war zone. Ironically, the local National Guard unit, which in other circumstances could actually have been mobilized to help, was serving in a real war zone thousands of miles away. (I’ll leave the obvious rant about what a group of soldiers from a part of the military intended for use only in times of great national emergency was doing overseas for another time.)
And, as you may recall, the response by all levels of government — city, state and federal — gives new meaning to the words “feeble,” “anemic” and “pathetic.” The lack of preparedness and the inability to mobilize a disaster response team still boggles my mind. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will make for textbook case studies in why a city that mostly exists below sea level and is close to large bodies of water should plan for disasters that happen on the order of every 1000 years instead of every 50 or 100 years.
But back to our story. Dr. Pou and the two nurses were helping out on a unit on the seventh floor of Memorial Medical Center, a unit run by an outside company whose scheduled doctor didn’t bother to show up (or to be fair, may not have been able to get there even if he or she tried). With dwindling supplies and staggeringly awful conditions, they and their colleagues struggled to provide the patients on that unit with basic care.
And in the days immediately after the hurricane, although an occasional boat came by to rescue people, there was no organized effort, and seemingly none on the way. Given that the phones and other means of communication were down, the people in the hospital had absolutely no idea what others outside of the hospital may have been planning.
By the Thursday following Hurricane Katrina, the situation in the hospital was becoming increasingly desperate. People needed to be evacuated. And here’s where the real story begins. Several sources told the Louisiana Attorney General, Charles Foti, that Dr. Pou and the nurses, while on the seventh floor unit to prepare patients there for evacuation, had purposely given 4 patients lethal doses of morphine and another drug called Versed. These individuals claim that Dr. Pou said she would take the responsibility for whatever happened.
Perhaps this happened, and perhaps it didn’t. Memory is a tricky thing, especially when you’ve been working around the clock for days on end in horrible conditions with little rest. Foti claims he has evidence that proves Dr. Pou and the nurses purposely killed these patients — and yet, none of this evidence has been made available to their attorneys. Color me a bit suspicious when someone claims to have evidence proving another person’s guilt, but that evidence is not available to the defense team.
The story doesn’t end there. Foti hasn’t brought charges against Pou and her colleagues. Instead, the criminal case is under review by the New Orleans District Attorney, who must decide whether to present it to a grand jury and seek to indict Pou and her colleagues, or whether to let it drop. Perhaps this is how things are done down there, or perhaps the attorney general doesn’t really have a strong case to begin with, and is hoping that the DA can find other charges to pin on Dr. Pou and the two nurses.
Pou adamantly denies that they performed any sort of mercy killing, though she does admit that during the whole fiasco, she may have administered medications to help patients remain comfortable. And in the interview, their attorneys wouldn’t let questions directly related to the case be answered — citing the fact that they have not seen the attorney general’s “evidence,” among other things as reasons why they couldn’t directly comment on Foti’s allegations.
I don’t know whether a crime was committed, or even how strong the evidence may be. Since the attorney general hasn’t released the “proof” either to the general public, or to Dr. Pou’s, Cheri Landry’s and Lori Budo’s attorneys, it’s not clear how strong a case he even has against them.
Before he or the New Orleans DA goes and prosecutes these individuals, I would suggest that they acquaint (or reacquaint) themselves with a certain concept in American jurisprudence, which is not taught much to average citizens, and that’s the concept of jury nullification. (Yes, Uncle Bud, I really was listening all those years ago.)
In a nutshell, jury nullification is (among other things) the power of a jury to base its verdict on whether a law is perceived as unjust, or the application of it is perceived as unjust by the jury. It was frequently asserted during the pre-Civil War era when juries refused to convict individuals for violating the Fugitive Slave Act, as well as during the 1920s when juries refused to convict individuals who may have violated local or federal alcohol control laws.
It has been used over the years since then, and sometimes not for good ends. Some even contend that the OJ Simpson verdict was jury nullification. If I were a prosecutor thinking of trying the case, I’d think long and hard before bringing charges against people such as Dr. Pou and nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo. Dr. Pou and her colleagues were working in terrible conditions, and they were there voluntarily.
They had every opportunity to leave before the levees broke, and they chose to stay and help the less fortunate. Plain and simple: Dr. Pou, Cheri Landry and Lori Budo didn’t have to be there. There wasn’t a law that required it, and no one put a gun to their heads. They simply wanted to do their jobs and help people.
We will probably never know exactly what happened up on that unit on the Thursday after Hurricane Katrina. But I have a good hunch that whatever happened was neither mercy killings nor murder. More likely than not, these people died because they were too sick to handle the terrible conditions the hospital had sunken into. Whatever medication may have been in their system when they died, I believe the deaths were most likely due to the fact that the hospital wasn’t able to function as a hospital at that time.
I have a hunch the DA will have a hard time getting a conviction (assuming he gets an indictment) given the overall circumstances — unless Dr. Pou, Cheri Landry and Lori Budo suddenly break down and confess their guilt. But judging by the story on 60 Minutes, I doubt that will ever happen. And judging by what I saw, I’m inclined to believe the doctor’s version of events more than the attorney general’s version.
But if I’m wrong, it may be further proof of the old adage, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
