Deals In Katrina Euthanasia Case?

Two nurses accused of taking part in killing patients at a hospital after Hurricane Katrina will testify before a grand jury, indicating prosecutors could be focusing on a doctor also accused in the case, a source close to the investigation said.

Nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry, and Dr. Anna Pou were arrested last summer but have not been charged in connection with the deaths of four patients at Memorial Medical Center after Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005.

"I want everybody to know that I am not a murderer, that we are not murderers," Pou said on CBS News' 60 Minutes last September.

The Times-Picayune, citing documents filed with the Louisiana Supreme Court, reports New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan has promised to drop the murder charges against the two nurses, instead hoping to compel their testimony.

The source, who asked not to be identified because the case is still under investigation, said Tuesday the two will testify under legal guidelines that preclude their testimony from being used against them, in return for waiving their Fifth Amendment constitutional right against self-incrimination.

CNN quotes sources close to the investigation as saying the two could testify in the next two weeks.

It was unclear whether their agreeing to testify indicated the nurses had been granted immunity by prosecutors. A spokesman for the district attorney's office would not comment on the case, citing grand jury secrecy rules.

However, the Louisiana Supreme Court on June 1 denied a writ seeking to allow the women to testify with their lawyers present, indicating they were no longer targets of the inquiry. That ruling is sealed until July 25. Under grand jury rules, lawyers are allowed to accompany witnesses only if they are considered targets of an investigation.

After hours messages seeking comment from the nurses' attorneys were not immediately returned.

Pou, Budo and Landry were arrested last summer, but have not been formally charged and are free on bond. The four patients were among 34 who died at Memorial Hospital after Katrina hit in 2005, but the only ones that Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti's office found to be homicides.

"We wouldn't have taken this action until we were positive ... of what we said in the allegations, and in the affidavit to the judge," Foti told 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer last year.

Power was knocked out at the hospital, surrounding streets were flooded and temperatures rose to 110 degrees Fahrenheit on the floor where critically ill patients were housed.

"I don't know if there's any way for me to describe to you how intense the heat was," Pou told Safer. "It was relentless. It was suffocating. It made it extremely difficult to breathe. And with the heat came the terrible smell from all of the human waste and the fact that we didn't have water."

Foti said the women put desperately ill patients to death using a lethal injection of drugs, after determining the patients were either too ill or too incapacitated to be moved. In an interview with 60 Minutes, he acknowledged some of the patients had "do not resuscitate orders" but "Do not resuscitate does not mean do not rescue."

The women, backed by many medical professionals, deny wrongdoing; Pou has said she was trying to ease the patients' pain, not kill them.

"I do not believe in euthanasia. I don't think that it's anyone's decision to make when a patient dies," Pou said in September. "However, what I do believe in is comfort care. And that means that we ensure that they do not suffer pain."

"We remain confident that once all the facts are known, all medical personnel will be exonerated of any criminal charges," Pou's attorney, Rick Simmons, said in a statement Tuesday. "The fact that certain witnesses may or may not be talking to the grand jury does not change that fact."

"I don't think I could have done anything more. I worked almost around the clock running up and down the stairs," Pou told Safer. "I did the best I could under these dreadful conditions that I did not create, but were created by the fact that we were abandoned."