By Nate Raymond and Brendan Pierson
(Reuters) – Massachusetts’ top court on Thursday revived the indictments against two former leaders of a veterans’ home charged with criminal neglect for their roles in handling a COVID-19 outbreak that killed 84 people.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in a 5-2 ruling, overturned a judge’s decision to throw out the charges against former Holyoke Soldiers’ Home Superintendent Bennett Walsh and former Medical Director David Clinton.
“Of course, sometimes bad things happen for no discernable reason, and no one is to blame,” Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt wrote for the majority. “At any subsequent trial, prosecutors will need to prove their case. We conclude only that they will have the opportunity to do so.”
A lawyer for Clinton declined to comment. A lawyer for Walsh could not immediately be reached.
In bringing the charges against the men in September 2020, then-Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, now the state’s Democratic governor, touted the criminal case as the first in the country tied to a COVID-19 outbreak at a nursing facility.
The case stemmed from a March 2020 decision to consolidate two dementia units, which prosecutors said put residents who had tested positive for COVID-19 within feet of ones without symptoms and increased the risk that residents would contract the virus.
That decision occurred at the onset of the deadly pandemic, before vaccines were available. The virus caused severe illness and death in many nursing homes nationally, and the outbreak in the 247-bed, state-run facility in Holyoke was one of the deadliest.
Prosecutors accused Walsh and Clinton of elder neglect and of permitting serious bodily injury to an elder in the case of five veterans, saying the merger increased the danger they faced by putting them in “basically an incubator for COVID.”
But a judge dismissed the indictments pre-trial in 2021, saying the evidence presented to the grand jury was insufficient to show that the condition of the five veterans would have been different but for the merger as they had already been exposed to COVID-19.
The state of Massachusetts last year agreed to pay nearly $58 million to resolve a lawsuit by families of veterans who contracted COVID-19 during the outbreak.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Brendan Pierson in New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)
