The term mercy killing is a loaded one and one that tends to generate sympathy for the killer.  It's also generally used in those cases when the victim of a murder is old, ill or disabled.  Young, healthy or nondisabled people tend to just become homicide victims.  The mercy description is only used for a few of us.  So I'm generally suspicious when I hear the term used in media reports in just about any context.

Within days of Katrina striking New Orleans, rumors surfaced of mercy killings and euthanasia at one or more hospitals in the area.  Apparently, these were more than just rumors - the attorney general in Louisiana has been investigating the allegations, although little about the investigation has become public.

Until now.

On February 16, NPR aired a story on All Things Considered on the investigation, after reviewing secret court documents from the investigation.  They make it clear that the allegations - if true - had nothing to do with compassion.

Briefly, the allegations revolve around a group of patients left on the seventh floor at Memorial Medical Center.  This floor was leased to a different entity, Lifecare Hospitals.  According to NPR, the patients on the seventh floor were all DNR patients - they had "do not resuscitate" orders. 

Life in the hospital was terrible.  There was no power and no functioning plumbing.  The temperature was about 100 degrees inside the hospital.  There were looters hitting nearby buildings and people trying to get into the hospital itself.  The staff who were required to stay with the abandoned patients wanted to get out.

Here is an excerpt from the story:

According to court documents reviewed by NPR, a key discussion took place on Thursday, Sept. 1, during an incident-command meeting held on the hospital's emergency ramp. A nurse told LifeCare's pharmacy director that the hospital's seventh-floor LifeCare patients were critical and not expected to be evacuated with the rest of the hospital. According to statements given to an investigator in the attorney general's office, LifeCare's pharmacy director, the director of physical medicine and an assistant administrator say they were told that the evacuation plan for the seventh floor was to not leave any living patients behind, and that a lethal dose would be administered, according to their statements in court documents.

In other words, the only way the staff could evacuate was if they could report there were nor more living patients to take care of.  This was not about compassion or mercy.  It was about throwing someone else over the side of the lifeboat in order to save yourself.

In fact, this doesn't look all that different from the abandonment of the 34 individuals in St. Rita's Nursing Home in Bernard Parrish.  In that incident, 34 people drowned after they were abandoned by staff.  Death by drowning is easy to prove and so the owners of the nursing home are charged with 34 counts of negligent homicide.  It's unclear what will happen in the case of LifeCare medical staff.  It's hard to prove morphine medication overdoses in badly decomposed bodies.

Admittedly, the hospital staff must have been exhausted and scared.  We can never know how they rationalized their actions (providing the accounts given by NPR are true).  But that doesn't make the alleged killings merciful - and no one should refer to these killings using that term again.  No one's calling the owners of St. Rita's merciful or caring. The same standard should apply to the LifeCare allegations.

Thanks to Laura Hershey for pointing this story out to me.

For the read or hear the full story on NPR, go to: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5219917