Jury selection begins Monday in the murder trial of William Husel, the former Mount Carmel doctor who faces 14 counts of murder.
Prosecutors contend Husel ordered excessive doses of painkillers that hastened the deaths of chronically-ill patients. Prosecutors recently dropped 11 other murder charges after Husel's attorneys objected to the standard prosecutors used to determine when doses became fatal.
Husel was removed from patient care duty on November 21, 2018, and fired two weeks later. Mount Carmel officials have said that Husel gave excessive doses of painkillers to at least 34 patients who died after being administered the drugs.
Husel's attorneys have said at least one patient lived for several days after receiving a dose that prosecutors previously said had "no legitimate medical purpose."
Pain management experts have said there is no defined standard on what a dose becomes "excessive."
“The whole area of how much pain medicine to give, how to manage someone who you are going to allow to die, is very grey,” said Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University, while speaking to WOSU in 2019.
“There's not like clear-cut rules or clear-cut standards about what to do," Caplan said. "So challenging, asking questions, that's very appropriate. But if you get answers that you think make sense or at least quiet down your questions, that's certainly common and would be happening at many hospitals.”
