Lawyers have reached the "framework" of a plea deal that would let Charles Cullen, the nurse who has confessed to killing as many as 40 patients, avoid the death penalty in return for giving a complete account of his deeds, a member of Cullen's defense team said Friday said Friday.
But prosecutors were quick to dismiss that claim, first reported on Friday in The Star-Ledger of Newark, insisting that there was still no deal in any form.
Talks about a plea bargain have been under way since December, after Cullen was charged with one count of murder and one of attempted murder. Prosecutors say he told them he killed 30 to 40 people over a 16-year nursing career that spanned nine hospitals and a nursing home in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but that he then stopped talking to them.
An official in the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the defense and the office of Peter Harvey, New Jersey's attorney general, had verbally put in place "the framework of a deal."
But the official said he could not give any specifics -- in particular, whether Cullen might, in theory, be eligible for parole some day. A state official insisted that the claim was "just incorrect and premature."
Johnnie Mask, Cullen's public defender, said in December that his client would cooperate if investigators ruled out the death penalty.
Several of the prosecutors involved said the idea appealed to them.
Without Cullen's help, they said, they would have little hope of proving which deaths he caused.
Cullen is under investigation in five counties in New Jersey and two in Pennsylvania, and the defense says a plea agreement would have to cover all of them.
Kristina Toth, who says she believes Cullen killed her father at Easton Hospital in 1998 -- prosecutors have called him a suspect in the death -- said that without a plea deal, hundreds of people like her would be haunted by doubts about what happened to their relatives. She added, "I think being in prison for the rest of your life is worse than death."
Cullen has been charged with killing the Florian Gall, a Roman Catholic priest, at Somerset Medical Center last year. Gall's sister, Lucille, said she would support a plea deal because "I don't believe in the death penalty and I think for the people that don't know, they need to have closure."
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