A Tennessee nurse charged with reckless homicide after a medication error killed a patient pleaded not guilty in a Nashville courtroom packed with other nurses who came in scrubs to show their support.
The error happened at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in December 2017 when RaDonda Vaught injected 75-year-old Charlene Murphey with the paralytic vecuronium instead of the sedative Versed.
The 35-year-old Vaught could not find Versed in an automatic dispensing cabinet, so she used an override mechanism to type in "VE" then picked the first drug that came up, according to court documents and a report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The Nashville district attorney's office has declined to speak about the decision to charge Vaught, but a spokesman sent reporters a document showing the definition of "reckless" in Tennessee code.
It reads, in part, that conduct is deemed reckless when a person disregards a substantial risk in a manner that "constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise."
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