Nurse RaDonda Vaught faces criminal trial for medical error : Shots ...

RaDonda Vaught, with her attorney, Peter Strianse, is charged with reckless homicide and felony abuse of an impaired adult after a medication error killed a patient.Four years ago, inside the most prestigious hospital in Tennessee, nurse RaDonda Vaught withdrew a vial from an electronic medication cabinet, administered the drug to a patient and somehow overlooked signs of a terrible and deadly mistake.The patient was supposed to get Versed, a sedative intended to calm her before being scanned in a large, MRI-like machine. But Vaught accidentally grabbed vecuronium, a powerful paralyzer, which stopped the patient's breathing and left her brain-dead before the error was discovered.Vaught, 38, admitted her mistake at a Tennessee Board of Nursing hearing last year, saying she became "complacent" in her job and "distracted" by a trainee while operating the computerized medication cabinet. "There won't ever be a day that goes by that I don't think about what I did."If Vaught's story had followed the path of most medical errors, it would have been over hours later, when the Tennessee Board of Nursing revoked her license and almost certainly ended her nursing career.But Vaught's case is different: This week, she goes on trial in Nashville on criminal charges of reckless homicide and felony abuse of an impaired adult for the killing of Charlene Murphey, the 75-year-old patient who died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in late December 2017.