Biography
Filipina Narciso was one of two Filipina immigrant nurses at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan — with co-defendant Leonora Perez — prosecuted in a case widely condemned as a racist frame-up.
Over several months in 1975, an unusual cluster of patients at the hospital suffered sudden respiratory failure — attributed to the unauthorized injection of the paralytic drug Pavulon into their IV lines, with ten deaths. After an FBI investigation, the two nurses, both recent immigrants, were charged in 1976; the patients who had identified them died before trial.
At a 1977 trial in U.S. District Court, the nurses were acquitted of murder but found guilty of poisoning and conspiracy to poison. The trial was marred by overt anti-Filipino racism — a prosecution witness called them "slant-eyed bitches," and the government floated the notion of a "nationwide conspiracy of Filipino nurses to murder veterans." Trial judge Philip Pratt set the guilty verdicts aside, finding the jury had been swayed by the prosecution's prejudicial conduct, and the government dropped all charges in 1978 after a new U.S. attorney concluded the public did not support the prosecution. No other suspect was ever charged, and the case became a landmark rallying point for Filipino-American and immigrant communities.
The Militant, March 25, 1977, page 30: The report attributes to the Detroit Free Press a claim that former supervisor Betty Jakim had confessed to her psychiatrist before her death and left a note exonerating the nurses. Defense attorneys were considering seeking dismissal for alleged withholding of that evidence; several murder counts had already been dropped. This is an attributed contemporary report and prospective defense motion, not a finding that Jakim committed the deaths or that the nurses had already been acquitted. Source: https://www.themilitant.com/1977/4111/MIL4111.pdf#page=30
The November 1977 Veteran dates the nurses’ trial verdict to July 20, 1977, after a forty-one-day trial and fourteen days of jury deliberations. The report describes the defense campaign challenging the prosecution and seeking a new trial. The verdict was later set aside; its date does not establish a sentence or renewed prison admission.
