Judge Bars Testimony on Outbreak Deaths

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

In a major setback to prosecutors, a federal judge has ruled that testimony and evidence of deaths caused in a nationwide fungal meningitis outbreak can not be used in the upcoming trial of 10 defendants linked to the company blamed for the outbreak.
In a 17-page ruling issued today in Boston, Mass., U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns ruled that the evidence and testimony of deaths would be highly prejudicial to the ten defendants who have not been charged with causing any of the deaths or involvement in the production of the contaminated drug that killed 76 people.
As Stearns noted prosecutors already had agreed not to present autopsy reports or elicit testimony from the next of kin of deceased victims.
Instead they said testimony would be limited to a CDC official, Dr. Benjamin Park, who played a key role in the prior trials of Barry J. Cadden and Glenn Chin. Cadden was president and part owner of the New England Compounding Center while Chin was a supervising pharmacist for the company. Both are now serving lengthy prison terms.
But Stearns ruled that even within those limitations agreed to by prosecutors, the effect would be highly prejudicial.
"I am convinced that the proposed evidence of patients' deaths and injuries entails a substantial risk that jurors will decide the case 'on an improper basis rather than on the evidence presented," Stearns wrote.
In the decision Stearns struck down one by one the series of arguments put forward by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Amanda Strachan and George Varghese.
He faulted prosecutors for failing to distinguish between two separate racketeering enterprises alleged in the original 2014 indictment. One, he wrote, involved murder and grievous injury, while the other did not. In addition he noted that both Cadden and Chin were cleared by separate juries of the murder/racketeering charges.
Stearns also rejected the argument by prosecutors that evidence of the deaths was necessary as a scene-setting device.
"The need for this information is slight and the liklihood of misuse is great," Stearns wrote.
Calling one argument of prosecutors "unfathomable," Stearns noted that Park's testimony in the Cadden and Chin trials was particularly detailed.
Park, he wrote "is a convincing witness and by all accounts one of the true heroes that emerges in the tragic story of the
response to the fungal meningitis outbreak."
While acknowledging that some of Park's testimony would be relevant to the charges against the remaining defendants, Stearns said, "the evidentiary shards are impossible to isolate from his more dramatic description of mass-scale injury and death related to the the tainted methylpredniolone acetate."
Contact: wfrochejr999@gmail.com