AP Worldstream
06-18-2004
Dateline: AMSTERDAM, Netherlands
An appeals court on Friday upheld the conviction and life sentence of a nurse who killed elderly and young patients, saying the harshest sentence under Dutch law was the only suitable punishment.
Lucy de Berk, 42, was first convicted in March 2003 of four murders at three hospitals in The Hague after administering lethal injections of drugs to patients in her care.
The five judges on the appeals panel found De Berk guilty of three additional murders and three attempted murders. It ordered that she undergo compulsory state psychiatric treatment, an unusual demand for someone sentenced to life in jail.
Only a handful of life sentences have been passed in the Netherlands, where serial killings are extremely rare.
"Only this punishment is adequate retribution for the crimes (De Berk) committed, characterized by an extent and gravity until now considered almost impossible in the Netherlands," said a summary of the judgment posted on the Internet.
Prosecutors had accused De Berk of 13 killings and five attempted murders between 1997 and 2001. The sentence handed down Friday was in line with their demand.
De Berk, who spent her troubled teenage years in Canada where she worked as a prostitute, left the courtroom weeping when it became clear she would be convicted during a reading of the verdict that lasted more than two hours.
Among her victims at the Juliana Children's Hospital were a 6-month-old girl, whom she gave an overdose of heart medication, and a 6-year-old boy whom she killed with sedatives. At the Red Cross Hospital and Lelyburg Hospital she murdered three elderly patients, the court found.
De Berk consistently denied the murders, but could not explain how in each case she was the only person in the room when the patients stopped breathing or went into cardiac arrest.
"The deaths or reanimation incidents were consistently sudden and unexpected and medically inexplicable," the judges said in the ruling. "All possibilities of natural causes of death were ruled out."
During appeals hearings, De Berk's defense lawyers tried to undermine the testimony of a statistician who calculated that the chances were one in 342 million that it was mere coincidence that she was on duty when all the patients under her care died.
That calculation did not form part of the verdict, but the judges took into account a lack of explanation for so many fatal incidents occurring in regular wards, not intensive care wards where fatalities are more common.
The judges said they were ordering further medical evaluations because earlier assessments failed to reveal De Berk's inner personality or a link between her psychological disorders and the killings.
Entries from De Berk's diaries read out in court, talked about a "strange compulsion" and a secret she would take with her to her grave. On Nov. 27, 1999, the day an elderly woman died in her care, she wrote that she had "given in" to her compulsion.
Copyright 2004, AP News All Rights Reserved
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