No charges filed against doctor in New Orleans...

An Orleans Parish grand jury Tuesday refused to indict Dr. Anna Pou, the New Orleans surgeon who rode out Hurricane Katrina at an Uptown hospital only to later be accused of murder by Attorney General Charles Foti.

The decision ends the year-long criminal investigation into Pou's performance during the catastrophe at Memorial Medical Center, which the levee failures turned into an island on Aug. 29, 2005, leaving the hospital a sweltering, powerless disaster zone, filled with 2,000 patients, families and employees. Pou, along with two staffers the district attorney recently declined to prosecute, had been accused of giving patients a lethal injection of painkillers and sedatives shortly before the hospital was finally evacuated, several days after the storm.

On Tuesday at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, Judge Calvin Johnson read a ten-count bill of indictment into the record, the first count a second-degree murder charge for patient Emmett Everett, 61, a 380-pound paralyzed man, and nine additional conspiracy to commit murder charges, accusing Pou of helping kill nine frail patients on the seventh floor at Memorial.

Many people in New Orleans believed that the charges against Dr. Pou were politically motivated. In a poll today in NOLA, the Times-Picayune on-line publication, 95% of respondents said that the Grand Jury had made the right decision.

Can you imagine how much this woman has suffered over the past year. And what about the damage to her reputation.