By
The Associated Press
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - Her job title was nurse but prosecutors say Kristen Gilbert was a serial killer, injecting patients at a veterans hospital with adrenaline to make their hearts race out of control.
Today, jury selection begins in federal court to determine if Gilbert, 32, killed four of her patients and tried to kill three others. If convicted, she could face the death penalty.
The case grew out of an unusual series of deaths in 1995 and 1996 that aroused suspicions among Gilbert's fellow medical personnel at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton.
Prosecutors say Gilbert, of Setauket, N.Y., secretly was injecting patients with the drug adrenaline in an attempt to look heroic in confronting medical crises she caused.
Defense lawyers have blamed the emergencies on natural causes or other drugs not given by Gilbert.
Without eyewitnesses to the drug overdoses, the government hopes to establish a pattern of violent behavior to buttress its case. But U.S. District Judge Michael Ponsor has strictly limited what the jury can hear, to avoid unfairly smearing Gilbert.
Prosecutors blame her for at least one other hospital death beyond those she is charged with, but the judge won't let prosecutors mention that. They say she also tried to poison her husband, but the judge struck that, too.
The prosecution lost another potentially important piece of evidence when the judge barred them from using a study by a university professor that showed 45 percent of the hospital's deaths over several years occurred during Gilbert's eight-hour shifts.
University of Massachusetts professor Stephen Gehlbach said there was a probability of one in 100 million that Gilbert would have been present at so many deaths by chance.
Though there won't be an insanity defense, prosecutors must walk a fine line in depicting Gilbert to the jury.
They have characterized her in hearings as volatile, out-of-control and needing psychiatric care, but if they raise strong doubts about Gilbert's mental health it could be more difficult to argue she deserves the death penalty if convicted.
The trial comes in a state that executed its last criminal in 1947 and banned capital punishment in 1984. Since then, all attempts to revive it have failed.
"There's something deeply unsettling about seeing a federal capital trial in a state that has said 'no' to that," said Ann Lambert, a lawyer for the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU opposes the death penalty.
To make sure that 12 impartial jurors and six alternates can be assembled, the court ordered about 550 potential jurors to report today to fill out questionnaires on their backgrounds and opinions. The pool is too big for the federal courthouse; the court will instead hold its first session in Springfield's Symphony Hall.
Both sides wanted to bar journalists from much of jury selection, but the Union-News newspaper and The Associated Press objected. Ponsor, who once worked as a reporter himself, decided to keep the process open.
An earlier conviction of Gilbert in a separate trial complicates the search for jurors whose opinions have not been tainted by prior knowledge of her or the case. Gilbert served a 15-month term for phoning an anonymous bomb threat to the hospital during the investigation of the deaths.
The new trial may extend into March, the judge has said.
