You know the substantial value and many rewards of your Maryland nursing practice. Those rewards include the satisfaction of patient care, financial security of a profession with a critical shortage of practitioners, and the reputation of a skilled, trusted, and respected healthcare professional. However, you could lose all those rewards to Maryland Board of Nursing disciplinary charges relating to your criminal arrest, charge, and conviction. Criminal conviction is one of the more common grounds for nurse license suspension, revocation, or other discipline before nursing boards across the country, including in Maryland. Retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team for your skilled and experienced license defense representation if you face Maryland Board of Nursing disciplinary charges involving criminal issues. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now for your best possible disciplinary outcome.
Maryland Nurse Criminal Arrests
Maryland nurses and nurses in other states have no immunity from criminal arrest, charges, and conviction. The Journal of Nursing Regulation reports that as many as 10% of nursing license disciplinary actions involve criminal convictions. Every year, around 5,000 nurses nationwide suffer license discipline related in some manner to a criminal conviction. All nurses face similar conviction issues, predominantly around drug, drunk driving, and theft crimes, although male nurses and licensed practical nurses (LPNs) suffer disproportionate discipline. License probation and suspensions are common, although license revocation is the more likely sanction relating to violent crimes and crimes involving patients. Around one out of every five nurses also face discipline for failing to disclose criminal convictions. Let our highly qualified attorneys help if you face license discipline over criminal issues.
Maryland Nurse Licensure Authority
Retaining your Maryland Board of Nursing license is critical to your continued nursing practice. You must deal with Maryland Nursing Board disciplinary officials, responding to their investigation and answering their disciplinary charges relating to your criminal issues. Section 8-205 of Maryland's Nurse Practice Act empowers the Board of Nursing to license and regulate nurses for practice in the state. The Act's Section 8-301 requires that you obtain a Board of Nursing license before practicing and retain that license to continue practicing. Section 8-701 makes unlicensed practice illegal, while Section 8-710 punishes unlicensed practice as a criminal misdemeanor subject to up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. If you lose your license due to disciplinary charges involving your criminal issues, you won't be able to practice nursing in Maryland. Let us help you defend your disciplinary charges.
Multistate Impacts on Maryland License Discipline
Maryland also participates in the national Nurse Licensure Compact. That participation means that you could lose a nursing license you hold in another state or lose the opportunity to gain a nursing license in another state, if you lose your Maryland nursing license over your criminal issues. Don't expect to run and hide from your Maryland nursing license disciplinary charges relating to your criminal issues. Instead, let us help you with our highly qualified license defense.
Maryland Nurse Licensure Requirements
Maryland's Nurse Practice Act Section 8-302 states the requirements to obtain and hold a Board of Nursing license. Those requirements include that you must demonstrate your good moral character. Section 8-302 also requires you to authorize a criminal history background check for the Board of Nursing to confirm that your criminal record does not contradict your required assertion of your good moral character. Criminal convictions for crimes of violence, dishonesty, and moral turpitude may prevent you from proving your continuing good moral character. Crimes relating to nursing practice may further establish your unfitness and disqualification from license renewal. Let us help you deal with the Board of Nursing regarding your criminal issues so that you can continue to meet license renewal requirements.
Maryland Nurse License Discipline
Maryland Nurse Practice Act Section 8-316 authorizes the Board of Nursing to deny, refuse to renew, suspend, revoke, or otherwise discipline a nursing license on the specified grounds. Those grounds include the conviction of certain crimes, as further addressed below. Those grounds also include misconduct that criminal arrest, charge, or conviction may implicate or establish. Those other forms of potentially criminal misconduct include fraud, willful filing of false reports, obstruction, unlicensed practice or practice beyond the scope of the license, drug or alcohol abuse, and misappropriation of patient or facility property. Let us help you defend disciplinary charges relating to criminal arrest, charge, or conviction, or charges implicating criminal misconduct.
Differences Among Arrest, Charge, and Conviction
It can make a huge difference in the outcome of your Maryland Board of Nursing disciplinary charges involving criminal issues, depending on whether you suffered only a criminal arrest, a criminal arrest with a criminal charge, or a criminal conviction. Understand the differences among criminal arrest, charge, and conviction. Our attorneys can help you deal before the Board of Nursing with any of those three outcomes to your criminal proceeding, as the following discussion shows.
Potential Effects of a Maryland Criminal Arrest
Your criminal arrest may not, on the one hand, have any effect whatsoever on your Maryland Board of Nursing license or license disciplinary proceeding. You ordinarily have no duty to report an arrest, only a conviction. Arrests occur on probable cause for the police to believe that you committed a crime. Arrests do not require evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Police let arrested suspects go all the time when the arrest fails to lead to evidence supporting a charge and conviction.
Maryland Board of Nursing disciplinary officials should thus ignore your arrest, except that an arrest may indicate that you have an underlying issue that could warrant discipline. The arrest itself is of no consequence but may highlight the Board's need to consider the underlying circumstances. We can help you respond to a Board investigation that your arrest triggers.
Potential Effects of Maryland Criminal Charges
If the police officer making your arrest discovers evidence supporting charges, they may present that evidence to a prosecutor who may decide to draft a criminal complaint and file it with the criminal court, constituting the criminal charges. Charges are thus a stronger indication that you may have an underlying issue worthy of Board of Nursing discipline. Smoke suggests the presence of a fire. Let us help you respond to a Board investigation that your criminal charge may trigger. You don't have a duty to report the charge to the Board, but Board officials may learn of the charge from the prosecutor, police, monitoring of criminal court filings, or other sources or methods.
Yet just as with a criminal arrest, the Board should not use the charge as evidence in itself of a disciplinary offense. To the contrary, you may beat the charge at trial, or the prosecutor may abandon it or the court may dismiss it. Let us help you determine how best to respond to your criminal charge in the context of a Board investigation or disciplinary proceeding.
Potential Effects of a Maryland Criminal Conviction
Your criminal charges may proceed to criminal conviction. Convictions occur by guilty plea, no contest plea, bench (judge) trial, or jury trial. When naming criminal convictions as grounds for license discipline, Maryland Nurse Practice Act Section 8-316 makes no distinction among the manner of conviction. Plea, bench trial, or jury trial will all do. Depending on the nature of your crime and its underlying circumstances, the Board of Nursing has the discretion to impose any license sanction or no license sanction. Section 8-316 says only that the Board may discipline for certain convictions, not that the Board must discipline.
The Board's discretion to impose sanctions enables our attorneys to argue on your behalf that your criminal conviction should not disqualify you from licensure. The key question is whether your continued licensure would expose any patient or the public to any significant risk. We can direct your defense evidence and arguments to that point, that you never presented a risk, or that you have rehabilitated your character to eliminate any prior risk. We can also advocate that your conviction bears no relationship to nursing practice, depending again on your circumstances.
Differences Among Specific Crime Charges
Maryland Nurse Practice Act Section 8-316 authorizes the Nursing Board to revoke, suspend, refuse renewal of, or otherwise discipline your license for two different categories of crime, including when you are convicted of either (1) “a felony” or (2) “a crime involving moral turpitude....” The following two subsections address how our attorneys help you defend disciplinary charges for those two categories of conviction.
As indicated above, your conviction of other, non-category crimes, particularly those directly relating to nursing practice, may indicate independent grounds for discipline. For instance, you may be convicted of a misdemeanor theft or drug crime that does not fall into either of the above categories but that occurred in or relates to your assigned healthcare facility. Those circumstances may be independent grounds for discipline, notwithstanding that the convictions do not fall into the statutory categories. We can help you defend those disciplinary charges, too.
Potential Disciplinary Effects of Maryland Felony Crimes
Convictions for felony crimes are of concern to the Maryland Board of Nursing because felony crimes are the more serious crimes, generally representing a substantially greater risk to patients, healthcare colleagues, and the public of various potential harms. Felony crimes can include violent crimes like murder, manslaughter, aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, sexual assault, robbery, terrorism, arson, and domestic violence. Felony crimes can also include serious crimes of dishonesty like embezzlement, fraud, or conversion involving valuable property. Felony crimes can also directly relate to nursing practice, like patient abuse or sexual assault, harassment or stalking of colleagues, theft or conversion of drugs, supplies, or patient personal property, healthcare fraud, and embezzlement of employer funds.
Our attorneys can help you defend Maryland Board of Nursing disciplinary charges relating to felony convictions. We may be able to show that the crimes had no relationship to your nursing practice, that you have rehabilitated your character since committing the crimes, that your crime had an extraordinary cause or extenuating circumstance not likely to occur again, and that you present no current risk to any patient, colleague, or member of the public.
Potential Disciplinary Effects of Maryland Crimes of Moral Turpitude
Crimes of moral turpitude can trigger Maryland Board of Nursing disciplinary concerns for different reasons. Crimes of moral turpitude indicate corrupt character. They include things like prostitution, solicitation to prostitution, drug trafficking, indecent exposure, corruption of a minor, and lewd and lascivious misconduct. The concern with moral turpitude crimes has less to do with violence and more to do with the potential for corruption, abuse, offense, and embarrassment of patients and colleagues, as well as loss of public trust and confidence in the nursing profession. Once again, we can help you show the Board of Nursing that you have rehabilitated your character since your crime of moral turpitude and that you present no patient, colleague, or public risk.
Maryland Nurse Duty to Report Criminal Issues
You may have a duty to disclose your criminal conviction to the Maryland Board of Nursing officials. Maryland Nurse Practice Act Section 8-316 includes as grounds for your discipline, your fraud or deception in obtaining or renewing your license, or your failure to submit to a criminal background check. The Board of Nursing will likely require you to disclose your conviction on your license renewal application and may directly inquire of you when learning of your criminal proceeding through other sources. Let us help you determine whether, when, and how to disclose your criminal conviction to reduce your likelihood of suffering credential fraud or other disciplinary sanctions.
Maryland Nursing License Disciplinary Procedures
Maryland Nurse Practice Act Section 8-316 requires the Board of Nursing to conduct disciplinary proceedings according to the hearing procedures of Section 8-317. Those provisions and other statutes and rules require the Board of Nursing to give you fair notice, a formal hearing to present your defense evidence, an appeal of adverse results, and a limited opportunity for court review. We can invoke these protective procedures on your behalf for the best disciplinary outcome.
Premier Maryland Nursing License Defense
If you have suffered criminal arrest, charge, or conviction, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team for your best license disciplinary outcome before the Maryland Board of Nursing. We help hundreds of nurses and other healthcare professionals in Maryland and nationwide with license defense involving criminal convictions and other issues. Call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now for our highly qualified defense representation.
