I wonder if this is the position the defense will approach from:
(1) a dysfunctional hospital (chaos, stress, short-cuts being taken)
(2) a nurse who is different from the other nurses. Stands up in the crowd. Different sex or age or class. More than average intelligence. Big mouth, critical.
(3) something goes wrong. Someone dies and everyone is surprised. (Why surprised: because of wrong diagnosis, disinformation, ….)
(4) Something clicks in someone’s mind (a paranoid doctor) and the link is made between the scary nurse and the event
(5) Something else clicks in … we had a lot more cases like that recently.
(6) The spectre of a serial killer has now taken possession of the minds of the first doctor who got alarmed and he or she rapidly spreads the virus to his close colleagues. They start looking at the other recent cases and letting their minds fall back to other odd things which happened in recent months and stuck in their minds. The scary nurse also stuck in their mind and they connect the two. They go trawling and soon they have 20 or 30 “incidents” which are now bothering them. They check each one for any sign of involvement of the scary nurse and if he’s involved the incident quickly takes on a very sinister look. On the other hand if he was on a week’s vacation then obviously everything must have been OK and the case is forgotten.
(7) Another conference, gather some dossiers – half a dozen very suspicious cases to report to the police to begin with. The process of “retelling” the medical history of these “star cases” has already started. Everyone who was involved and does know something about the screw-ups and mistakes says nothing about them but confirms the fears of the others. That’s a relief – there was a killer around, it wasn’t my prescription mistake or oversight of some complicating condition. The dossiers which will go to the police (and importantly, the layman’s summary, written by the coordinating doctor) does contain “truth” but not the *whole truth*. And there is lots of truth which is not even in hospital dossiers (culture of lying, of covering up for mistakes).
(8) The police are called it, the arrest, there is of course an announcement inside the hospital and there has to be an announcement to the press. Now of course the director of the hospital is in control – probably misinformed by his doctors, obviously having to show his “damage control” capacities and to minimize any bad PR for his hospital. The whole thing explodes out of control and the media feeding frenzy starts. Witch hunt, and then witch trial.
JMO But it matches some of what the defense have said in court. The witch hunt, the confirmation bias, the meetings behind the scenes.