Nurse’s Term Suspended in 2 Deaths : Woman Pleads No Contest in Life-Support Tampering Cases

A registered nurse who prosecutors said hastened the deaths of two critically wounded patients was granted a suspended prison sentence Monday after pleading no contest to two counts of voluntary manslaughter in San Fernando Superior Court.

Judge John H. Major stayed a 6 1/2-year prison sentence for Linda Rangel, 35, of Canyon Country, who tampered with the life-support systems of two patients at Holy Cross Medical Center.

He also ordered her never to engage in nursing or health care again, fined her $500 and ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service.

Rangel, a critical-care nurse at the Mission Hills hospital for eight years, was originally charged with two counts of attempted murder for lowering the oxygen levels on the ventilators of Lorraine Sammons, 50, of Lake View Terrace and Pedro Contreras, 40, of Sun Valley.

Both shot themselves in suicide attempts. The prosecution accepted medical reports that said the two probably would never have regained consciousness.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lee Harris amended the charges Monday to attempted voluntary manslaughter because, he said, there were no indications that Rangel acted with malice when she lowered the oxygen without consulting physicians or the patients’ families.

Rangel told probation interviewers that she felt pressured by a shortage of beds in the critical-care unit and worried that patients were not allowed to “die with dignity.”

“I can’t say what the defendant’s true motivation was, whether she wanted to increase bed space for patients who needed it or whether she was an angel of mercy who could not bear to see needless suffering,” Harris said.

Still, the prosecutor said, Rangel had no right to usurp powers reserved for doctors.

“A physician could have reduced the oxygen by his own hand or ordered someone else to do it and that would have been recognized in the bioethical community as a cessation of heroic measures,” Harris said. “But no registered nurse must make that decision unilaterally. A message had to be sent to the medical profession that duties must be defined and all participants must adhere to that.”

Rangel pleaded no contest--under California law, essentially the same as a plea of guilty for criminal court purposes--to the amended charges Monday.

The judge said he did not feel that Rangel deserved to go to prison, saying that the patients inevitably would have died anyway.

Since her resignation from Holy Cross, Rangel has run her own dog grooming business. In a letter to the court, she said she had no desire to return to nursing, saying she had “suffered intense emotional burnout and depression from working with critically ill and terminal patients for so long.”