Nurse gets prison for taking patient fentanyl
Defendant used syringe to extract drug from IV bag
A registered nurse caught taking fentanyl from a patient under her care at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield has been sentenced to three months in prison.
Jessica Lotto, 37, of Pittsfield, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Mark G. Mastroianni in federal court in Springfield to three months in prison to be followed by one year of supervised release. Lotto pleaded guilty to one count of acquiring a controlled substance by fraud, deceit or subterfuge on May 31, 2022.
Lotto, on Feb. 27, 2019, “entered a sedated patient’s hospital room and removed fentanyl from the patient’s IV bag with a syringe,” according to prosecutor Deppika Bains Shukla’s sentencing memo filed Monday. She was caught in the act by the director of the center’s Critical Care Unit.
She then had a “brief exchange” with the director and then “dropped the syringe into the sharps container on the wall,” the memo states. The director then had housekeeping unlock the container and found the 60 milliliter syringe with about 10—11 milliliters of liquid inside, which was later tested to be the same concentration as the hospital’s standard fentanyl infusion solution.
While the memo notes that the solution was still flowing to the patient, Lotto could have easily contaminated the bag by her actions.
“It is hard to conceive of a more vulnerable victim than the patient in the instant case,” the prosecutor wrote. “Given the patient’s compromised medical condition and need for fentanyl for pain management, the patient was ‘particularly susceptible’ to the defendant’s criminal conduct.”
In his own sentencing memo, defense attorney Alexander Sohn notes that Lotto followed the “effectively normalized … model of a ‘high functioning addict’” set by her parents. He wrote that her father smoked pot daily and her mother “would drink anywhere from a half, to a full, bottle of wine every evening.”
He also noted that Lotto on March 1 “will have four years of sobriety from opiates.” Despite having her nursing license suspended, she has since taken on training and rehabilitation and was granted “limited reinstatement of her” privileges. Prosecutor Shukla asked for a sentence of 36 months, or three years, probation with the first six months to be served at home.
“The defendant stole fentanyl from the IV bag of a patient who was unaware of the defendant’s actions. In doing so, she put the patient at risk of infection and other diseases,” Shukla summarized. “However, the defendant is charged with a single incident, and she did not attempt to tamper with the patient’s IV bag by replacing the fentanyl with another substance, as did many of the defendants who received lengthy prison sentences.”