Chin Seeks End of Murder Charges

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

Charging that prosecutors have utterly failed to produce needed evidence, lawyers for a former pharmacist are asking the Michigan Appeals Court to allow them to challenge the decision to send 11 second dgree murder charges to a jury.
In a 16-page filing this week in the appeals court, lawyers for Glenn Chin said the murder charges cannot stand because prosecutors failed to identify any single act by Chin that led to the deaths of 12 Michigan patients.
Chin and his former boss, Barry Caddden, were charged with second degree murder following an investigation of the 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak which was caused by steroids produced at the New England Compounding Center.
Cadden was president and part owner of the now defunct company and Chin supervised the clean room where the fungus ridden methylprednisolone acetate was produced. Cadden is also asking the appeals court to consider overturning the December decision by Circuit Court Judge Michael P. Hatty to send the murder charges to a jury.
The motion filed today by Kevin S. Gentry concedes that "the clean room was not all that clean," but states prosecutors "utterly failed to even try to offer evidence on actual causation."
In fact, the filing states, the clean room conditions were "outright unsanitary and messy."
Nonetheless prosecutors failed to identify any act by Chin that caused the drugs to become contaminated, the motion states, noting that tests showed the drugs were sterile after Chin performed the initial compounding.
Subsequently they were placed in vials by other NECC employees and shipped to health providers in Michigan and some 20 other states.
"Some particular act of his (Chin) must be seen to have, more likely than not, to be the cause of the deaths," the motion states.
"The methylprednisolone acetate was sterile at the time it left Chin's hands," the filing states, adding that no one has been able to determine exactly how or when the drugs became contaminated with a deadly fungus.
Prosecutors from the state Attorney General's office, the Chin filing states, tried to hide that lack of causation evidence "behind a mountain of mental state evidence."
Contending that the case is really a product liability case, the motion states that there has never been a second degree murder finding based on the type of evidence presented against Chin.
The motion asks the appeals court to allow Chin's lawyer to appeal the so-called bind over order now, even though a final judgement has not been made in circuit court.
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