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Killer nurse gets 30 years
10/05/2006 15:17 - (SA)
London - A British nurse who murdered two patients and poisoned 15 others at an Oxfordshire hospital was jailed for 30 years on Wednesday.
Benjamin Geen, 25, secretly administered toxic doses of drugs to patients. The drugs gave them severe breathing difficulties and the patients needed immediate resuscitation - which he would get a kick out of giving.
Geen was given two life sentences at the Oxford crown court for the murders, and eight years for the assaults. The sentences are to run concurrently.
Prosecutors said Geen derived a thrill from taking patients to the brink of death so he could revive them. Two of his victims at the Horton General Hospital in Banbury, Oxfordshire - David Onley, 77, and Anthony Bateman, 66 - did not recover and died in January 2004.
The jury also found Geen guilty of causing grievous bodily harm to 15 other, mainly elderly, patients who recovered after they stopped
breathing.
'No sentence will be long enough'
'No sentence will be long enough for what Geen has done,' said British police spokesperson Kate Smith. Jurors deciding the case were told how excited Geen became whenever a patient collapsed.
He would inject patients with a variety of lethal doses of drugs,
including insulin, muscle relaxants and sedatives, which caused them to stop breathing.
He was arrested after British health officials investigated why so many patients were falling victim to sudden respiratory failure.
Geen was found to be the link in each case, but denied he was to blame. The jury convicted him of offences committed between December 2003 and February 2004.
- Reuters
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