Biography
Leonora Perez was one of two Filipina immigrant nurses at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan — with co-defendant Filipina Narciso — 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.
