Research may help clear nurse convicted of murder

The mother of a convicted murderer believes new research by an expert offers hope for a fresh bid to clear his name.

Glasgow-born nurse Colin Norris was found guilty in March 2008 of murdering four elderly patients while he worked at Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) and the city’s St James’s Hospital in 2002.

He was jailed for at least 30 years.

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A doctor alerted the authorities after noticing that one of the four people had suddenly and unexpectedly slipped into a hypoglycaemic coma from which she later died.

Norris’s trial at Newcastle Crown Court was told that Ethel Hall, 86, who was not diabetic, had been injected with a massive and fatal dose of insulin, which reduced the sugar content in her blood to a level where her brain became starved of the glucose it needed to function properly.

Tests revealed insulin levels 12 times the norm, the court heard.

Norris has always protested his innocence and denied injecting patients with insulin.

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Insulin expert Prof Vincent Marks has told the BBC that research he carried out showed hypoglycaemic episodes, where people slipped into comas, were not “that rare” among elderly patients in hospitals.

Norris’s mother, June Morrison, told BBC Radio Scotland yesterday that she always believed her son was innocent of the murders.

She said: “It’s very good to hear that this new evidence is going to be presented.

“When we asked Prof Marks to do the report, we didn’t know what the results were going to be, and when he did come back with this, it was very, very helpful to us.”

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Asked what the last four years had been like for her and the family, she said: “It’s been like a nightmare, you’re in a bad dream.

“You just don’t believe it is real, but it is real. It’s been horrendous, dreadful.”

She said Norris had his own “coping mechanism” in prison and he was coping.

“I can’t help him inside the prison, I can do as much as I possibly can out here,” she added.