Robert J. Price, a 32-year-old White male from Birmingham, Alabama, was a profoundly vulnerable patient at Cooper Green Hospital when his life took a horrifying turn. He was a quadriplegic, and the official case against nurse Joseph Dewey Akin centered on the allegation that Akin injected him with a lethal dose of lidocaine, a drug used in cardiac treatment. Prosecutors argued that Price did not simply suffer a natural medical crisis, but that he was deliberately pushed into one.
Toxicology findings described in later court records and case summaries said the amount of lidocaine in his body was far beyond any therapeutic level, strong enough to convince investigators that this was not a mistake but a killing carried out inside a hospital room, in a place where Price should have been safest.
What made the case even more chilling was the testimony surrounding Price’s final medical emergency. According to accounts tied to the prosecution’s evidence, another nurse, Marion Albright, returned from lunch and saw Akin coming out of Price’s room just before the code blue. She said he tried to keep her from going back inside, a detail that became one of the most haunting parts of the case. The state’s theory was that Akin had not only poisoned Price, but had done so with the perverse aim of triggering a dramatic crisis, allowing him to rush in as the rescuer. Court records also show prosecutors introduced evidence about other code blue emergencies involving patients on the same day, arguing that the incidents revealed a pattern or scheme rather than an isolated event. Price’s death therefore became more than a single suspicious hospital fatality; it became the case that opened a window into a far darker suspicion surrounding Akin’s work.
There was an arrest, and Joseph Dewey Akin was charged with murder in Price’s death. He was convicted at trial and sentenced to life in prison, but that conviction did not hold. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals reversed it because of a jury-selection issue, ordering a new trial. In the years that followed, the case dragged on through retrials and legal maneuvering. One retrial ended in a deadlock, leaving Price’s family without a final resolution. Before another trial could begin, Akin ultimately pleaded guilty to manslaughter. That plea meant there was a conviction connected to Robert Price’s death, but not for murder, and it closed the case in a way that many observers have viewed as far less than the original allegations suggested. Beyond Price’s killing, Akin was widely suspected in numerous other patient deaths and medical emergencies at hospitals where he had worked, but Robert Price’s case remained the one that produced the arrest, the prosecution, and the eventual plea.
