News

By Gudrun Schultz

BAVARIA, Germany, February 8, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A male nurse accused of killing 29 people has admitted he is guilty of causing the deaths of some patients, BBC reported today.

Stephan Letter, 27, said he had acted out of compassion, although he told the Bavarian court that his actions “cannot be justified under any circumstances…I took the rest of [the patients’] lives away without being asked, and took away what human dignity they had left.” He said he killed to spare people suffering.

Mr. Letter faces 16 counts of murder, 12 counts of manslaughter, one of killing on demand, and two of attempted manslaughter. He has asked the court to convert the 16 murder charges to manslaughter, which would carry a lesser penalty.

At the time of his arrest he admitted to police that he had killed 12 people by lethal injection. He said he could not remember what happened in the other deaths.

Yesterday, Mr. Letter refused to say how many deaths he was responsible for causing, retracting his previous statements.

“I confessed to killings which I did not commit,” he told the court.

Mr. Letter was arrested in July 2004, when police conducted an investigation into a clinic where he had worked, which was missing medication.

Investigators found open vials of enough medication to kill 10 people at his home, prosecutors told the court.

Post-mortem autopsies have been performed on the exhumed bodies of 42 patients who died at the clinic during the 17 months he worked there.

Following the autopsies, Mr. Letter was charged in the deaths of 17 female and 12 male patients, ranging in age from 40 to 94. Most of the patients were more than 75 years old at the time of death.

Wilhelm Seitz, representing the families of 11 alleged victims, said Mr. Letter’s choice of patient was random.

“Not all of the patients were seriously ill, and he had no contact at all with some of them.”

Germany has not legalized euthanasia, although doctors who provide suicide assistance to patients who request help are not punished, according to a Deutsche Welle news report from 2005.

See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

Swiss Euthanasia-Providing Group Branches Out to Germany
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/oct/05100506.html