Former Mass. Official on Witness List

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

The former director of the Massachusetts Pharmacy Board, who was fired in the midst of a deadly outbreak, may be testifying for one of the remaining defendants in the criminal case stemming from that same 2012 outbreak.
A witness list filed this week by lawyers for Gregory Conigliaro, includes James D. Coffey, who was director of the pharmacy board in 2012, but was fired after it was disclosed that he failed to act when he was informed that a Massachusetts licensed pharmacy had been found in violation by the Colorado licensing board.
That pharmacy was the New England Compounding Center, the company that state and federal regulators determined caused the deadly outbreak. Conigliaro was vice president and part owner of NECC.
Also on Conigliaro's witness list is Susan Manning, another former Massachusetts pharmacy board employee, who was placed on administrative leave at the same time. She was a board attorney.
The two failed to inform the pharmacy board when they were told by a Colorado official that NECC was selling drugs in that state without individual prescriptions as required in that state.
The Conigliaro witness list was one of more than a dozen filings this week by lawyers for Conigliaro and seven other defendants who will go on trial next month in U.S. District Court in Boston, Mass.
The eight are among 14 indicted following a two year probe of the deadly outbreak which sickened 778 patients in more than 20 states. Seventy-six of them died.
Other motions filed this week include a request that prosecutors be barred from mentioning that a recycling business was located right next door to the building where NECC prepared sterile drugs, including the injectable steroid contaminated with a deadly fungus.
In the motion the defendants' attorneys argued that federal prosecutors had tried unsuccessfully to infer that the recycling business was the source of the deadly fungus.
"Evidence of the recycling business is irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial,"the motion states.
Conigliaro's lawyer filed a separate motion asking U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns to bar prosecutors from using emails and other communications between their client and various boards of pharmacy across the country.
He argued that those communications were not relevant to the charge Conigliaro faces involving the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Conigliaro held the title of vice president for government regulation at NECC. In addition he was a part owner of NECC and owner of the adjacent recycling business.
Still other defense motions seek to bar prosecutors from the using "prejudicial language," which the lawyers charge were used by prosecutors in the trials of co-defendants Barry Cadden and Glenn Chin.
Cited were statements accusing Cadden of playing Russian Roulette with the lives of patients and testimony by a federal official comparing the 2012 outbreak with the Ebola outbreak.
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