Prosecutors Seek $82 Million, Boosted Sentences

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to nearly double the prison sentences of two former drug company officials and order them to pay $82 million in restitution, nearly all of it going to 379 victims of a deadly fungal meningitis outbreak.
In two lengthy filings in U.S. District Court in Boston, Mass. prosecutors asked for the prison sentences for Barry J.Cadden and Glenn Chin be increased to 17.5 years.
Cadden, who was president and part owner of the defunct New England Compounding Center was originally sentenced to a nine-year term. Chin who was a supervising pharmacist at NECC, was originally given an eight-year sentence.
Citing a ruling by the First Circuit Court of Appeals, Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Strachan wrote that the two caused an unprecedented public health crisis that sickened nearly 800 patients and killed over 100 of them.
The filings ask that Cadden be forced to forfeit $11.2 million, up from $7.5 million, while Chin should forfeit $473,584, up from the original order of only $175,000.
In the 30-page filing on Cadden, prosecutors said he showed "an unconscionable disregard for the lives of the patients injected with his drugs."
In the 29-page filing on Chin, Strachan wrote that he was "not only a knowing and willful paticipant in NECC's fraudulent activity, he directed them."
The sentencing memorandum states that, based on the appeals court ruling, Chin's sentence should be increased for three factors including the vulnerability of the victims.
Another enhancement is justified, according to the filing, because Chin's actions put patients at the risk of death or serious bodily injury.
Enhancements cited in the Cadden filing include the fact that the victims who were injected with NECC's contaminated drugs were in fact vulnerable victims.
The filing cites a victim's impact statement submitted by Russell Rusalow, in which he described his father's "tortuous death" after treatment with an NECC drug.
Chin and Cadden were among 14 people connected to NECC who were indicted in 2014 following a two-year federal investigation of the 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak.
The filing notes that the steroids contaminated with deadly fungi were shipped to 76 facilities in 23 states. The July 7 re-sentencing session will be held before U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns, the judge who set the initial prison terms for both Chin and Cadden. The appeals court ruling overturned several of Stearns findings, including his decision that people sickened by NECC's drugs did not meet the legal definition of victims. Stearns concluded that the actual purchasers of NECC's contaminated drugs and health insurance companies were the only victims. The prosecution filing recommends that those purchasers and insurers get $1.9 million.
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