Charles Cullen

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Charles Cullen : biography

February 22, 1960 –

Prompted by the Cullen case, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and 35 other states adopted new laws which encourage employers to give honest appraisals of workers’ job performance and which give employers immunity when they provide a truthful employee appraisal. Many of the laws, passed in 2004 and 2005, strengthen disclosure requirements for health care facilities, bolster legal protections for health care facilities that report improper patient care and require licensed health care professionals to undergo criminal background checks and be fingerprinted at their own cost.

Arrest and sentencing

Cullen was arrested at a restaurant on December 12, 2003, charged with one count of murder and one count of attempted murder. On December 14, 2003, Cullen admitted to homicide detectives Dan Baldwin and Tim Braun the murder of Rev. Florian Gall and the attempted murder of Jin Kyung Han, both patients at Somerset. In addition, Cullen told the detectives that he had murdered as many as 40 patients over his 16-year career.

In April 2004, Cullen pleaded guilty in a New Jersey court to killing 13 patients and attempting to kill two others by lethal injection while employed at Somerset. As part of his plea agreement, he promised to cooperate with authorities if they did not seek the death penalty for his crimes. A month later, he pleaded guilty to the murder of three more patients in New Jersey. In November 2004, Cullen pleaded guilty in an Allentown, Pennsylvania court to killing six patients and trying to kill three others.

In July 2005, Cullen was in the Somerset County Jail in New Jersey as authorities continued to investigate the possibility of his involvement in other deaths. Cullen is currently serving a sentence of life in prison without parole for over 100 years, to be served consecutively with his other sentences in Pennsylvania. On March 2, 2006, Cullen was sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences in New Jersey, and is ineligible for parole for 397 years. Currently, he is held at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, New Jersey.

On March 10, 2006, Cullen was brought into the courtroom of Lehigh County President Judge William H. Platt for a sentencing hearing. Cullen, who was upset with the judge, kept repeating "Your honor, you need to step down" for 30 minutes until Platt had Cullen gagged with cloth and duct tape. Even after being gagged, Cullen continued to try to repeat the phrase. In this hearing, Platt gave him an additional six life sentences. As part of his plea agreement, Cullen has been working with law enforcement officials to identify additional victims. Cullen originally told authorities about 40 patients he could specifically recall killing during the course of his 16-year nursing career.

In August 2006, Cullen donated a kidney to the brother of a former girlfriend.

Murders

The date of Cullen’s first murder is unknown. The first murder that he told detectives he recalls occurred on June 11, 1988, while working at the burn unit of St. Barnabas Medical Center. Judge John W. Yengo, Sr. had been admitted to the hospital suffering from a photoallergic reaction to a blood-thinning drug.Hepp, R (December 1, 2004). Cullen admits killing N.J. judge. . Retrieved July 8, 2013. Cullen administered a lethal overdose of intravenous medication to Judge Yengo. Cullen admitted to killing several other patients at St. Barnabas, including an AIDS patient who died after being given an overdose of insulin . Cullen quit his job at St. Barnabas in January 1992 when hospital authorities began investigating who had tampered with bags of intravenous fluid. In fact, the St. Barnabas internal investigation determined that Cullen was most likely the person responsible for contaminating the IV bags with insulin. Cullen’s random contamination of so many IV bags with insulin is believed to have caused the deaths of dozens of patients during his five-year tenure at St. Barnabas. The number of these deaths far exceed the number of victims to which Cullen ultimately confessed.