Former nurse found guilty in accidental injection death of 75-year-old patient

RaDonda Vaught and her attorney, Peter Strianse, listen as verdicts are read at her trial in Nashville, Tenn., on Friday, March 25. The jury found Vaught, a former nurse, guilty of criminally negligent homicide and gross neglect of an impaired adult in the death of a patient to whom she accidentally gave the wrong medication.

RaDonda Vaught, a former nurse criminally prosecuted for a fatal drug error in 2017, was convicted of gross neglect of an impaired adult and negligent homicide on Friday after a three-day trial in Nashville, Tenn., that gripped nurses across the country.

Vaught faces three to six years in prison for neglect and one to two years for negligent homicide as a defendant with no prior convictions, according to sentencing guidelines provided by the Nashville district attorney's office. Vaught is scheduled to be sentenced May 13, and her sentences are likely to run concurrently, said the district attorney's spokesperson, Steve Hayslip.

Vaught was acquitted of reckless homicide. Criminally negligent homicide was a lesser charge included under reckless homicide.

 Medical professionals across the U.S., many of whom worry it could set a precedent of criminalizing medical mistakes. Medical errors are generally handled by professional licensing boards or civil courts, and criminal prosecutions like Vaught's case are exceedingly rare.

Janie Harvey Garner, the founder of Show Me Your Stethoscope, a nursing group on Facebook with more than 600,000 members, worries the conviction will have a chilling effect on nurses disclosing their own errors or near errors, which could have a detrimental effect on the quality of patient care.

"Health care just changed forever," she said after the verdict. "You can no longer trust people to tell the truth because they will be incriminating themselves."

In the wake of the verdict, the American Nurses Association  expressing similar concerns about Vaught's conviction, saying it sets a "dangerous precedent" of "criminalizing the honest reporting of mistakes." Some medical errors are "inevitable," the statement said, and there are more "effective and just mechanisms" to address them than criminal prosecution.

"The nursing profession is already extremely short-staffed, strained and facing immense pressure — an unfortunate multi-year trend that was further exacerbated by the effects of the pandemic," the statement said. "This ruling will have a long-lasting negative impact on the profession."