All told, Brackman and four other nurses at the Hospice of St. Peter’s in Helena, Mont., went to the drawer perhaps 10 or 11 times in behalf of terminally ill patients between the fall of 1989 and July 1990. “It just happened,” Brackman said. “It sounds like such a stupid answer.” They didn’t set out to break any laws, they said, but relatives of dead patients had turned in leftover drugs, and the drawer was a convenience when supplies ran out and pharmacies were closed. None of the nurses used any of the drugs, or gave patients medicine that hadn’t been prescribed. But last October, when another nurse blew the whistle on the rule-bending to the Montana Board of Nursing, state lawyer Steven Shapiro was named to prosecute the five nurses, together with a sixth who said she dispensed no drugs from the drawer, but said she had been aware of the stash. Shapiro demanded that their licenses be revoked or suspended and that the nurses undergo urinalysis, psychological evaluation and enforced drug education.
That touched off five months of hearings and a raging controversy in the mountain-ringed serenity of Helena. The daily Independent Record got hundreds of letters, most of them arguing that the nurses were “angels of mercy.” “Is it so awful to relieve the excruciating pain of a terminal patient?” one woman wrote. Black-and-yellow lapel buttons appeared: “Free the Hospice Six.” A medical ethicist from the University of Minnesota argued that the nurses might “have broken the letter of the law, but they may well have honored the moral spirit of nursing.”
Prosecutor Shapiro reported getting death threats, and guards escorted him to and from the hearing room. “The case is not about human pain and suffering,” Shapiro said. “It’s about violations of the Nursing Practices Act … My job is to follow the law, not to worry about public relations.” When John Bobinski, the hearing examiner, recommended mere reprimands for the six, Shapiro asked the board to overrule him.
In the end the board did stiffen the penalties–but only by putting the six on probation, for terms of three to five years. Board member Blanch Proul said the nurses had acted out of compassion, but their solution couldn’t be condoned; it would “open the door to chaos in the nursing profession.”
There was jubilation in Helena. When the six went out for a victory dinner, the owner of the restaurant picked up the tab for the party of 14. Their lawyer Gary Davis called the decision “basically fair,” and supervisor Mouat, who got the heaviest sentence, acknowledged that “It’s not a black-and-white issue … I don’t feel that we lost or won.” But Alene Brackman remained unrepentant. “I know in my heart I would do it again,” she said. “If they want to crucify me for it, so be it.”
