Benjamin Geen

The Horton General Hospital in Banbury, during 2010. It was built in 1872 and slightly expanded in both 1964 and 1972 and was nearly closed early in 2005 and late 2016.

Benjamin Geen is a former nurse convicted of murdering two patients and causing grievous bodily harm to 15 others in 2004 while working at Horton General Hospital in Banbury, Oxfordshire. He has maintained his innocence and statisticians have pointed to circumstantial evidence as an example of poor reasoning about rare events.[1]

Crime

Between December 2003 and February 2004, 7 patients suffered respiratory arrests and respiratory depressions while Ben Geen was on duty. While 5 patients recovered soon after, two patients died in January 2004: Anthony Bateman and David Onley. Geen was arrested on February 9, 2004, whereupon an empty syringe was found in his pocket. Later test indicated the presence of a muscle relaxant.

Geen claimed that he had accidentally taken the half-empty syringe home in his nurse's scrubs' pocket after a chaotic day in Emergency. His girlfriend, a nurse herself, doing the washing, said that she had found it and had told him he ought to return in to be disposed of properly.

The internal hospital investigation identified a total 27 cases (not just of respiratory arrest) that were to be scrutinised as being suspicious and that Geen could have been involved in. Nine were later discounted and Geen was charged with having administered unauthorised drugs causing respiratory or hypoglycaemic arrest in 18 cases. He was acquitted in one of the 18 cases, which was found to be due to natural causes.

Trial

During his trial, the Oxford Crown Court was told that Geen purposely used potentially lethal doses of drugs to cause patients to stop breathing because he enjoyed the thrill of resuscitating them. He was found guilty in April 2006, and given 17 life sentences. The trial judge recommended that he should spend at least 30 years in prison before being considered for parole.

Appeal

Geen's case was reviewed by lawyers and volunteers from the London Innocence Project. The review found a number of flaws in the original trial, and lawyers came to the conclusion that Geen was "the victim of a major miscarriage of justice."

A leading medical statistician, Prof Jane Hutton, submitted a report arguing that the Crown's central evidence - that there had been an 'unusual' pattern of illnesses - was of 'no value' because no statistical modelling had been done to show that the pattern was unusual. She found the 'pattern' method to be at grave risk of bias.

Dr Mark Heath, a consultant anaesthesiologist who has testified in US supreme court cases, argued in another report that the pattern of patient collapses was inconsistent with the drugs Geen was said to have injected in seven cases. Rather than passing out, patients injected with muscle relaxants as the crown stated would be paralysed, unable to breathe but totally conscious and terrified.

Other medical experts pointed out that the likely cause of death in the case of Mr Onley, a gravely ill patient whom Geen was alleged to have killed, was not a heart attack triggered by respiratory arrest but liver failure caused by the patient's alcoholism, unknown to the hospital when he was admitted to Emergency.

Mark McDonald, Geen's barrister, and founder and chair of the London Innocence Project, has stated that he believes the case against Geen was the product of a "witch-hunt" in a health service terrified of a repeat of the case of Dr Harold Shipman.

A first appeal failed in November 2009, the judges concluding "we see nothing in the proposed grounds of appeal". In February 2010, Geen's case was submitted to the Criminal Case Review Commission and a public campaign was launched by the London Innocence Project. The CCRC has commissioned statistical research into the rarity or otherwise of respiratory arrest in A&E.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "A Data Detective Story: Did A British Nurse Kill His Patients?". FiveThirtyEight. 2016-05-06. Retrieved 2016-05-09.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4297233.ece The Times of London "Nurse was victim of Shipman hysteria" ]

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