June 27 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave two doctors convicted of abuse of their licenses in the midst of the U.S. opioid epidemic to write thousands of prescriptions for addictive pain medications another chance to challenge their sentences.
The judges ruled 9-0 in favor of Xiulu Ruan and Shakeel Kahn, who argued in appealing their sentences that their trials were unfair, as jurors were not required to judge whether the two doctors had “good faith” reasons to believe their numerous prescriptions for opioids. were medically valid.
Liberal Judge Stephen Brier, who wrote for the court, said that once defendants provided evidence that they had been authorized to release controlled substances such as opioids, prosecutors had to prove they knew they were acting in an unauthorized manner.
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The judges returned the two cases to federal appeals courts, which had previously upheld their convictions for further proceedings, where prosecutors could argue that any errors in the jurors’ instructions constituted innocuous errors.
The United States has been battling an opioid epidemic for more than two decades, which federal health officials say has claimed the lives of more than half a million Americans.
States have sued pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies to hold them accountable, but another key element in the public health crisis is the role of doctors in prescribing huge amounts of highly addictive pain medications.
Some doctors have been accused of turning their medical practices into “pill mills” – routinely prescribing controlled substances without medical necessity and outside the bounds of normal professional practice.
There have been divisions in the lower courts over the standard by which doctors can be convicted of violating a federal law called the Controlled Substances Act, which regulates a number of substances, including painkillers such as opioids, for prescribing outside of professional practice.
Rouen, who practices in Alabama, and Cannes, who practices in Arizona and then in Wyoming, were sentenced to 21 and 25 years in prison, respectively, in separate criminal cases.
Prosecutors said Rouen and a business partner ran a clinic in Mobile that issued nearly 300,000 prescriptions for controlled substances from 2011 to 2015 and was one of the best prescribers of some fentanyl-based painkillers in the United States.
Prosecutors said he accepted discounts from drugmaker Insys Therapeutics Inc to prescribe fentanyl spray to patients. Insys founder John Kapoor was later convicted of plotting to bribe doctors, including Rouen, to prescribe the drug and fraud insurers to pay for it.
Prosecutors said Kahn regularly sold prescriptions for money and illegally prescribed large amounts of opioid pills, killing at least one patient from an overdose.
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Report from Nate Raymond in Boston; Edited by Will Dunham
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