Re: Democrat Doctor who prescribed more than 500, 000 opioid doses has conviction tossed

On 15 Mar 2022, Lefty Lundquist <[email protected]> posted some
news:[email protected]: 

> Democrats want to kill everyone in the USA.

(Reuters) - A Virginia doctor who prescribed more than 500,000 opioid 
doses in less than two years had his conviction and 40-year prison 
sentence thrown out by a federal appeals court on Friday, because the jury 
instructions misstated the law.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia also ordered a 
new trial for Joel Smithers, 41, who has been serving his sentence in an 
Atlanta prison.

Overprescription of painkillers is one of the main causes of the nation's 
opioid crisis. Nearly 645,000 people died in the United States from 
overdoses involving opioids from 1999 to 2021, including 80,411 in 2021 
alone, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Prosecutors said Smithers prescribed controlled substances including 
fentanyl, hydromorphone, oxycodone and oxymorphone to every patient he saw 
at the Martinsville, Virginia office he opened in August 2015.

A majority of patients traveled hundreds of miles each way to see 
Smithers, who did not accept insurance and collected more than $700,000 in 
cash and credit card payments before law enforcement raided his office in 
March 2017, prosecutors said.

Jurors convicted Smithers on 861 counts in May 2019, after being 
instructed that the government needed to prove he acted "without a 
legitimate medical purpose or beyond the bounds of medical practice."

The appeals court found this instruction defective in light of a 2022 U.S. 
Supreme Court decision that said the crime of prescribing controlled 
substances required a defendant to "knowingly or intentionally" act in an 
unauthorized manner.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Roger Gregory said 
Smithers' jury instructions were defective because jurors could have 
convicted him solely for acting outside the bounds of medical practice, 
regardless of his knowledge or intent.

He also said such an error was not harmless, even in cases with "copious 
evidence of a defendant's guilt."

The office of U.S. Attorney Christopher Kavanaugh in the Western District 
of Virginia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"A doctor's guilt depends purely on his subjective beliefs," said Beau 
Brindley, a lawyer for Smithers. "Any attempt by the government to pretend 
otherwise was resoundingly rejected."

The case is U.S. v. Smithers, 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 19-
4761.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

https://news.yahoo.com/doctor-prescribed-more-500-000-181108724.html