Lucia de Berk - Life Sentence

Life Sentence

On 24 March 2003, De Berk was sentenced by the court in The Hague to life imprisonment for the murder of four patients and the attempted murder of three others. The verdict depended in part on a statistical calculation, according to which the probability was allegedly only 1 in 342 million that a nurse's shifts would coincide with so many of the deaths and resuscitations purely by chance. De Berk was however only sentenced in cases where, according to a medical expert, other evidence was present or in which, again according to a medical expert, no natural causes could explain the incident.

In the appeal on 18 June 2004, De Berk's conviction for the seven murders and three attempted murders was upheld. The crimes were supposed to have taken place in three hospitals in The Hague: the Juliana Child Hospital (JKZ), the Red Cross Hospital (RKZ) and the Leyenburg Hospital, where De Berk had worked earlier. In two cases the court concluded that there was proof that De Berk had poisoned the patients. Concerning the other cases the judges considered that they could not be explained medically, and that they must have been caused by De Berk, who was present on all those occasions. The idea that only weaker evidence is needed for the subsequent murders after two have been proven beyond reasonable doubt has been dubbed chain-link proof by the prosecution and adopted by the court. At the 2004 trial, besides a life sentence, De Berk also received detention with coerced psychiatric treatment, though the state criminal psychological observation unit did not find any evidence of mental illness.

Important evidence at the appeal was to be the statement of a detainee in the Pieter Baan Center, a criminal psychological observation unit, at the same time as Lucia de Berk, that she had said during outdoor exercise: "I released these 13 people from their suffering". However, during the appeal, the man withdrew his statement, saying that he had made it up. The news service of the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation (NOS) and other media that followed the process considered the withdrawal of this evidence to be a huge setback for Public Prosecution Service (OM). A series of articles appeared over the following years in several newspapers, including Vrij Nederland and the Volkskrant, raising doubts about the conviction.

The case was next brought to the Netherlands Supreme Court, which ruled on 14 March 2006 that it was incorrect to combine life imprisonment with subsequent psychiatric detention. Other complaints were not taken into consideration, and the evidence from a re-analysis by a Strasbourg laboratory was not considered relevant. The Supreme Court gave the matter back to the Court in Amsterdam to pass judgement again, on the basis of the same factual conclusions as had been made before. Some days after the ruling of the Supreme Court, De Berk suffered a stroke and was admitted to the hospital of Scheveningen prison. On July 13, 2006, De Berk was sentenced by the Court of Appeal in Amsterdam to life imprisonment, with no subsequent detention in psychiatric care.