Room 214

Norma Leanues was 51 years old and living in Taunton, Massachusetts, when she had surgery in the spring of 1980 at Morton Hospital to remove a cancerous tumor pressing on her spine. Her doctors believed she was dying. In Room 214 she screamed for hours at a stretch, and nothing she was given reached the pain.

Over two nights in May 1980, licensed practical nurse Anne Capute gave Leanues morphine sulfate in doses of thirty and then forty-five milligrams, where the written order was fifteen. Leanues died on May 18. Her body was later exhumed. A second autopsy found no cancer in her vital organs, and a specialist told the grand jury that treatment could have given her years. Capute was indicted for first-degree murder and for dispensing a controlled substance without a license.

The trial turned on whether Leanues was dying anyway and on who had authorized the doses. On October 23, 1981, after roughly thirteen hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted Capute on both counts. The story did not end there. The following summer the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Nursing found she had obtained her 1977 license using a childhood friend’s name and school records, having dropped out of high school at sixteen. She surrendered the license on July 15, 1982. Two other Morton Hospital nurses had also been charged in the case.