Doctor and two nurses arrested for euthanizing patients in New Orlean's Memorial Medical Center after Hurricane Katrina. Some months back, NPR ran a facinating and disturbing story about the investigation. Are the arrested medical personnel guilty? I don't know. But what disturbed me about the NPR story was the fixation on whether a lethal cocktail of drugs was administered to the patients. The implication being, that abandoning these patients to die of "natural" causes in the evacuated hospital would have been perfectly legal and ethical. To quote from the NPR article:

According to court documents reviewed by NPR, a key discussion took place on Thursday, Sept. 1, during an incident-command meeting held on the hospital's emergency ramp. A nurse told LifeCare's pharmacy director that the hospital's seventh-floor LifeCare patients were critical and not expected to be evacuated with the rest of the hospital. According to statements given to an investigator in the attorney general's office, LifeCare's pharmacy director, the director of physical medicine and an assistant administrator say they were told that the evacuation plan for the seventh floor was to "not leave any living patients behind," and that "a lethal dose would be administered," according to their statements in court documents.

Now, as I understand this passage and the rest of the article, my understanding of the timeline seems to be that it was concluded, with evacuation efforts faltering, that the patients were to be abandoned, and then some staff members concluded that those to be abandoned should, out of human decency, be euthanized. If there is criminal conduct here, it is in abandoning these patients, not in giving them morphine. In discussing the difficulty of conducting forensic analysis on the deceased, the NPR piece notes that "the bodies were not retrieved from the hospital until two weeks after the storm and were in advanced stages of decomposition." So the patients were abandoned for two weeks without food or water, in a hospital with no electricity where temperatures were well above 100 degrees. Yeah, giving morphine to someone in that position is clearly immoral.

Again, I really don't know what happend in that hospital, and I can't say for sure whether those arrested today are guilty. But to me, guilt or innocence should not come down to who gave morphine to whom. If the people arrested made the decision to abandon the patients (i.e., they concluded that euthanizing them would be easier than moving them), they deserve their present fate. But if they were merely responding to the failure of someone (the hospital? FEMA?) to evacuate the most vulnerable patients of Memorial Medical Center, then I believe a grave miscarriage of justice is in the works.