Nurse Lucia de Berk Not Guilty, Says Prosecution

Lucia de Berk’s conviction will go down as one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in Dutch legal history, according to the Dutch daily newspaper NRC.

I originally wrote about this case back around Halloween of 2007 here. If you haven’t read the background first, I recommend you go take a peek. It was some damned good writing, if I do say so myself — good enough to thoroughly alienate a few Dutch friends of mine.

Anyway, the Dutch equivalent to our Attorney General’s office has decided that there were actually no crimes committed, thus it’s pretty unlikely that Lucia de Berk is a murderess, serial or otherwise, and maybe she shouldn’t have spent all that time in jail away from her partner and growing daughter. It’ll take another month for the ruling judge to come back with his final verdict, and THEN there’s the matter of compensation for being unjustly imprisoned and having her life yanked out from under her feet like a cheap rug by a DA who was hot for the glory of putting away a rare pretty female serial killer.

She might not get as much recompense as I would’ve hoped because there were some problems with her qualifications for having gotten her job as a nurse in the first place, but anything would be good. Currently she’s on the dole because 1) she had a stroke in prison and is possibly worse off from that than she should be because no one was around (like, say, family) to notice quickly and get her to treatment and 2) no one will hire her for anything because, like, she’s still a convicted serial killer. Oh, but she’s NOT ACTUALLY on the dole because they don’t give out welfare to convicted serial killers.

But hey, at least she’s not still in jail.

This won’t be over until she has some kind of compensation in hand for what this failure of the Dutch legal system did to her. Let’s see what happens NEXT month.

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March 17, 2010 · by xalieri · Posted in Everything Else  
　　　　

Comments

2 Responses to “Nurse Lucia de Berk Not Guilty, Says Prosecution”

  1. Marty on March 17th, 2010 2:15 pm

    Yes, good news indeed.

    I was in court today and it was oh so fine to see the A.G. squirm and try to place the blame for Lucia’s persecution on anyone but his own office.
    They had nowhere to run, no case to present.

    They couldn’t resist insisting though that she was nevertheless still guilty of retaining a two library books past their return date. This will give them leverage when it comes to the compensation question, she was convicted of a whole package of “crimes”, only the three murders & seven attempted murders have been disproved and dismissed today, she remains “guilty as charged” for the library books, a tube of disinfectant gel she’d taken home in her nurse’s uniform pocket and exaggerating her High-School grades to get into nurse’s school.
    Six and a half years in jail should be enough to cover those evil deeds, one would hope, but it may affect her chances of compensation, or at least the level of that compensation.

    Who am I?
    I’m a guy who saw an obvious wrong being done and couldn’t stand by and watch it happen.

    Thanks for flagging this up.

  2. vidicon on March 17th, 2010 2:46 pm

    Two late library books, a tube of disinfectant “borrowed” from work, and exaggeration on the ol’ resume. That sounds like what everyone else on earth might be guilty of were inspectors to suddenly come calling with warrants. If that’s what it takes to deny compensation for the harshest kind of defamation of character I can imagine and six years in prison, then the Dutch still have a ways to go before they get this justice thing down.

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