Photo: Carl Court / AFP / Getty Images
The Nashville District Attorney’s Office released a statement following the conviction of RaDonda Vaught after the jury found the former nurse guilty of criminally negligent homicide.
Vaught administered a lethal dose of the wrong medication to Charlene Murphy, of 75 years, in December of the year 2017. The woman was waiting for a standard scan at Vanderbilt University Medical Center when the nurse was supposed to give him a sedative, but to see that she administered a medication that causes paralysis, so in 20 minutes died.
The past Saturday, prosecutors released an image of the cap that was on the medication that Vaught applied to Murphy. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, on the medicine’s cap said on a label “warning: paralyzing agent”.
Nurses in the USA were distraught after the jury’s verdict and, as a result, nurse candidates may be less eager to join this career or stop reporting medical errors.
For its part, the American Nurses Association reacted to this by saying that the verdict of guilt could have a “chilling effect on reporting and process improvement”.
Therefore the Prosecutor’s office stated that the sentence was not an accusation against the nursing profession, but rather about the “gross negligence committed by RaDonda Vaught” .
The District Attorney’s Office issued the following statement:
“The jury’s conviction of Radonda Vaught was not an indictment against the nursing profession or the medical community. This case was, and always has been, about Radonda Vaught’s gross negligence causing the death of Charlene Murphey . This was not a ‘singular’ or ‘momentary’ error.
Several health professionals were on the jury. The jury found that Vaught made a series of decisions to disregard her nursing training and instead failed to adhere to safety protocols that proved to be fatal.
The jury found this level of care to be so far below the proper standard of a reasonable and prudent nurse that the verdict was justified”.
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