BOSTON, March 26 (Reuters) - Two former leaders of a Massachusetts
veterans' home that was the site of one of the deadliest COVID-19
outbreaks at a U.S. long-term care facility on Tuesday resolved criminal
neglect charges against them without having to go to prison.

Former Holyoke Soldiers' Home Superintendent Bennett Walsh and former
Medical Director David Clinton withdrew their previous not guilty pleas
during hearings in Hampshire Superior Court and admitted there were facts
sufficient to find them guilty of the charges against them, prosecutors
said.

The case had been set to go to trial next week. State prosecutors had
asked for both men to be sentenced to one year of home confinement, with
three years of probation.

At the urging of defense lawyers, Justice Edward McDonough instead
continued the cases against them without a finding of guilt for a three-
month period, at which point the charges could be dismissed if they comply
with certain conditions.

Those requirements include barring them from working in a nursing home or
initiating contact with victims' families. The judge had previously
dismissed the case, but Massachusetts' highest court revived it last year.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said she was
"disappointed and disheartened" by the judge's decision. "Today the
justice system failed the families who lost their loved ones at the
Holyoke Soldiers' Home," Campbell said.

The coronavirus 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.

In bringing the charges 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 focused on a March 2020 decision to consolidate two dementia
units, which prosecutors said put residents who tested positive for COVID-
19 close to ones without symptoms and increased the risk that residents
would contract the virus.

Prosecutors accused Walsh and Clinton of criminal neglect in the case of
five veterans, saying the merger increased the danger they faced by
putting them in essentially an incubator for COVID.

Walsh's lawyer, Michael Jennings, in court on Tuesday stressed how "poorly
understood" the virus was at the beginning of the pandemic, before
vaccines were available, and how, like his predecessors, the Marine Corps
veteran lacked training to lead a nursing facility.

The state of Massachusetts in 2022 agreed to pay nearly $58 million to
resolve a lawsuit by families of veterans who contracted COVID-19 during
the outbreak.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ex-leaders-massachusetts-veterans-home-
avoid-prison-over-covid-outbreak-2024-03-26/