'Cover-up' charged

"Unfortunately what happened here is the Hospital for Sick Children embarked on a campaign of deception and confusion ... a misguided orgy of deception designed to distort the truth," said lawyer Frank Gomberg, who represents Lisa's parents, Bill and Sharon Shore, of Thornhill. Gomberg said nurses Ruth Doerksen and Anagail Soriano perpetrated a "cover-up" of their mistakes, in which hospital staff and officials acquiesced.

Gomberg urged the jury to render a verdict of "homicide" which, at an inquest, has no connotation of liability or blame.

The accusations were called baseless "insinuations and innuendos" by hospital counsel Patrick Hawkins.

Lisa, 10, died at Sick Kids on Oct. 22, 1998. She had been admitted with excruciating leg pain from a non-life-threatening condition.

Already prescribed two anti-convulsant drugs and one sedative, she then got morphine at the hospital. The jury has heard Lisa likely died of respiratory and heart failure due to an interaction between morphine and gavapentin, an anti-convulsant drug.