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1/31/18, "Pharmacist tied to U.S. meningitis outbreak gets eight years in prison," Reuters, Nate Raymond
"A Massachusetts pharmacist was sentenced on Wednesday to eight years
in prison after being convicted on racketeering and fraud charges
stemming from his role in a 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak that killed
76 people and sickened hundreds more.
Glenn Chin, the former
supervisory pharmacist at New England Compounding Center, was convicted
by a federal jury in Boston in October but was cleared of second-degree
murder charges, which would have exposed him to a maximum prison
sentence of life.
Prosecutors had asked U.S. District Judge
Richard Stearns to sentence Chin, 49, to 35 years in prison for
overseeing the dispensing of substandard drugs made in filthy conditions
at the now-defunct Framingham, Massachusetts-based NECC.
Prosecutors
said those drugs included mold-tainted steroids produced at NECC that
were then injected into patients, harming at least 793 people in 20
different states.
Stearns said the outbreak pushed families to the
breaking point and caused many to lose faith in the medical system and
regulators who were "derelict in their oversight of compounding
pharmacies like NECC that make custom drugs....
But Stearns
said he could not allow personal feelings to interfere with reaching a
fair sentence for Chin, who received a year less than the nine-year
prison term the judge imposed in June on NECC's co-founder and former
president, Barry Cadden.
Prosecutors said that Chin, while
supervising the so-called clean rooms in which NECC's drugs were made,
directed staff to ship untested drugs, use expired ingredients, falsify
cleaning logs and ignore mold and bacteria.
"He knew that by doing these things that harm could occur, and it did," Assistant U.S. Attorney George Varghese said in court.
Chin's
lawyer, Stephen Weymouth, said he was "incredibly sorrowed and
remorseful for what he has done." But he argued Chin should be sentenced
to just 37 months in prison as he had been following the directions of
Cadden.
"He was calling the shots," Weymouth said. "He had the power."
The
verdict in Chin's case came after a separate jury in March found Cadden
guilty of racketeering and fraud but similarly cleared him of
second-degree murder over the deaths of 25 people.
Beyond Chin and
Cadden, charges were filed in 2014 against 12 other people associated
with NECC. Three have pleaded guilty. A trial for the remaining nine
defendants is scheduled for October."
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