Innocent Murder ; The Trial of Sister Jessie McTavish, Edinburgh 1974 (Four Scots Trials Book 2)

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If police, press and prosecutors make decisions like this, what almost happened in Las Vegas would close down every intensive care unit in the country,” he says. The professor said international medical studies carried out in the years since the 35-year-old Glaswegian was convicted told a different story. Now of course the director of the hospital is in control – probably misinformed by his doctors, obviously having to show his ‘damage control’ capacities and to minimize any bad PR for his hospital.

Fortunately, she survived – but only just – and Norris, despite having failed, felt confident enough to move on. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40. The concern must be a genuine concern about a crime, criminal offence, miscarriage of justice, dangers to health and safety and of the environment – And the cover up of any of these. And there is even more truth outside the hospital dossiers (a culture of lying, the covering up of mistakes). Remember the t-shirt ‘Join the British Army: go to interesting places, meet interesting people, and kill them‘?The circumstantial evidence for Baby E is some of the strongest yet I still couldn't convict on this individual death, even though I think she's guilty, so actually IF you don't consider the patterns BM has done his job here. However, McTavish had admitted in police interviews that she had administered insulin to patients without authorisation.

He put the odds of her presence being a mere coincidence at one in 342 million, a staggering figure that seems to have blinded the court to any alternative explanation of the deaths. If a person wishes to raise their concerns they should obtain a copy of their organsiations whistleblowing policy and seek advice. Mrs Bourke's body was exhumed, but Mrs Ludlam and Mrs Crookes were cremated, giving detectives no scope for testing. In chilling echoes to the case of Colin Norris, the trial heard that the nurse had even predicted to another nurse the exact time that 80-year-old Elizabeth Lyon woman would die. On 25 June, Norris gave Mrs Ludlam an "unnecessary" dose of diamorphine, twice the recommended level.Wendy Hesketh discusses this in her forthcoming book (An Introduction to Medico-crime, due out end of 2014). But on the night of patient Fraser’s death, nurse Barbara Farro, who usually worked an earlier shift, became upset that Adams and some other nurses were playing cards and seemed indifferent to Fraser’s failing life signs. Daniel Green has served nearly three decades in a North Carolina prison maintaining his innocence in the killing. Over those 19 months, he committed 13 known murders-crimes that included vicious sexual assaults and bizarre stagings of the victims' bodies. Detectives checked the medical records of other patients who had died after slipping into comas when Norris was on duty.

If the jurors had been fully informed, they would have learned that he suffered from a peptic ulcer and chronic cirrhosis of the liver, and that five physicians had agreed his condition was terminal. Post conviction, Sister McTavish got not one but two lucky breaks when a legal precedent from the days of capital punishment led to a successful appeal and the fact that in 1975 she was not subjected to a re-trial.

There was little other evidence to convict her, except for traces of toxic substances found in two of the exhumed bodies. Whilst insulin has undoubtedly been a boon to diabetes victims, at one time it had the reputation of being both deadly and undetectable if wrongly used; even today, experts often disagree about whether it has been criminally abused, the much publicised von Bulow prosecutions in the 1980s being one example and the case of Colin Norris being a more recent one. Although that decision in this case has had absolutely horrific consequences, they probably did feel at the time it was much kinder for everyone involved if they could find a cause of death and avoid more unnecessary trauma. Mr Gregg said there were similarities with the case of Harold Shipman, the GP who murdered hundreds of patients.