The 30 Most Memorable Cases Of The Last 30 Years

24. Kristen Gilbert's Capital Murder Trial

It was the first death penalty case in Massachusetts in more than a quarter-century.

Kristen H. Gilbert, a nurse in Northampton, was indicted in 1998 for murdering four of her patients and attempting to murder three others by injecting them with lethal doses of epinephrine, a synthetic form of adrenalin that sent their hearts racing out of control.

Though Massachusetts abolished the death penalty in 1975, because the crimes were committed at a federal facility — the Veterans Administration hospital in Northampton — the federal death penalty statute applied.

The trial in U.S. District Court in Springfield ran from Nov. 20, 2000 to March 26, 2001, and included some 52 days of testimony, 70 witnesses and 210 exhibits. More than 250 motions were filed before and during trial, with the government appealing three of Judge Michael A. Ponsor's rulings.

Mid-trial, the prosecution was dealt a dramatic blow: It had to abandon its toxicology case when its nationally renowned expert admitted his data was faulty.

In the end, jurors found the 33-year-old mother of two guilty of first-degree murder but pronounced themselves deadlocked on the death penalty issue. Ponsor subsequently sentenced Gilbert to mandatory life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

In a commentary for The Boston Globe, Ponsor reflected that presiding over the Gilbert trial "was the most complicated and stressful thing I've ever done."

The long and grueling case also took its toll on David P. Hoose of Springfield, who along with attorneys Harry L. Miles and Paul S. Weinberg had to put their practices on hold in order to defend Gilbert.

"I basically did not open another criminal file from August 2000 until April 2001," Hoose told the Springfield Union-News. "My inventory was basically down to nothing."