Chin Trial To Begin With Time Limits

By Walter F. Roche Jr

Under a judge's streamlined schedule the trial of the second major defendant stemming from the criminal probe of a deadly 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak is set to begin later this month.
Jury selection in the trial of Glenn A. Chin is set for Sept. 15 with opening arguments scheduled to begin four days later. The trial in U.S. District Court in Boston, Mass. follows the March conviction of co-defendant Barry J. Cadden, who was convicted  following a marathon 10-week trial.
Cadden was president and part owner of the New England Center, the company that produced the contaminated steroids blamed for the outbreak that sickened 778 patients, killing at least 76 of them.
Chin was NECC's chief pharmacist and he faces many of the same charges as Cadden.
Chin's trial, however, won't be a repeat of the Cadden trial due to an order issued this summer by U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns.
In an initial July order Stearns limited prosecutors to 60 hours to present their case with Chin's lawyers capped at 20 hours. After an appeal by the U.S. Attorney, Stearns upped the prosecution limit to 75 hours while keeping Chin's lawyers to a 20-hour limit.
The revised limits would indicate the trial could last five weeks or about half the time consumed in the Cadden trial. Stearns order states that he will consider extensions on the limits only as the trial proceeds.
Like Cadden, Chin is charged with racketeering and 25 counts of second degree murder. But Cadden, who is now serving a nine-year prison sentence, was acquitted on all the murder charges. He was convicted on a total of nearly 60 counts of racketeering, conspiracy and mail fraud.
While Chin now faces the same charges as Cadden, there are key differences in the facts charged against the two defendants.
Cadden was the president and a stockholder of NECC. Evidence presented at his trial showed the millions of dollars he and his wife profited from NECC. Chin, a supervising pharmacist, was an employee with no ownership interest.
While Cadden was the chief pharmacist, prosecutors never charged that he had any hands-on role in the production of the steroids that triggered the outbreak. In contrast the indictment charges that Chin was directly involved in the production of fungus laden methylprednisolone acetate.
For instance the indictment states that Chin "attempted to sterilize" one of the deadly drug lots by placing the drugs in an autoclave for 15 minutes and five seconds, instead of the required 20 minutes.
In addition, it charges, he failed to verify the sterilization process and to follow the accepted industry standards for sterilized drugs.
Chin was not only directly involved in the production of the suspect drugs, he was the supervisor in the clean room where that production occurred, prosecutors have charged
Another key difference in the two cases is the contention by prosecutors that NECC produced the fungus laden steroids that caused the outbreak.
While Cadden conceded at the outset that NECC produced the deadly lots of methylprednisolone acetate, Chin has made no such concession. During the Cadden trial, government witnesses conceded that they never found the exact fungi found in victims in the lengthy and detailed examination of NECC's Framingham, Mass. factory.
While there are marked differences in the Cadden and Chin cases, prosecutors are likely to seek to replicate testimony from the Cadden trial in which a string of NECC employees  described a locker room atmosphere with frequent lapses in the proper preparation of sterile drugs destined for injection in the spines and joints of unsuspecting patients.
It is also likely that Chin will seek to blame Cadden for any problems at NECC, just as Cadden's lawyers repeatedly argued during his trial that it was Chin who cut corners and opened the door to tainted and deadly drugs being shipped to hundreds of unsuspecting health care providers.
Stearns cited the likely blame shifting when he reluctantly agreed not to put both defendants on trial at the same time, as originally planned.
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