Blessed are the Merciful

For they shall be charged with murder.

The announcement of the arrests and the investigation recall the difficulties confronted by hospitals and nursing homes in the city after the hurricane struck and medical personnel struggled to care for their patients. At Memorial, evacuation efforts faltered, emergency generators could not support air conditioning and temperatures inside the building exceeded 100 degrees.

Mr. Foti said that the patients were injected with what he described as a “lethal cocktail” of morphine and midazolam hydrochloride that “guarantees they are going to die.”

“It is not my job or duty to say what the motive was,” Mr. Foti said.

No? Is it your job or duty to take into account that conditions were life-threatening, that these medical providers were isolated and in a position of responsibility for probably dozens, if not hundreds of people without any of the things they needed to care for them, that the local, state, and federal governments had completely fallen down on the job, that the apparatus that supports the running of hospitals and long-term care centers had been destroyed, and that these patients were (one assumes) unable to survive without that apparatus (else they would not have been in an acute care center)? And that thus it is almost certainly the case that whatever medical care these nurses and this doctor gave was, as the doctor herself says,

“the best treatment that we could [give] to the patients in the hospital to make them comfortable”

--that is, to not let the die, in pain, of heatstroke?

No, apparently not. But apparently it is Mr. Foti's job to moralize and second-guess the decisions of people who were in a position that the rest of us can only pray we never have to cope with.

“We’re talking about people that pretended they were God and they made that decision,” Charles Foti, the AttorneyGeneral for Louisiana, said yesterday. “This is a homicide. This is not euthanasia. . . . If someone goes to a nursing home you want to think that they are safe."

Even if their lack of safety--not to mention their medical conditions--was, in fact, an act of god.

I wonder what the families of the dead people think of this. And I want to know when the people who were really responsible for those deaths will be charged.