Cadden Fights Increased Prison Sentence

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

One of the former pharmacists convicted of racketeering and related charges is asking a federal judge not to nearly double his sentence, but he does concede a $175,000 forfeiture order should be increased but only to $249,538.
In a 42-page filing in U.S. District Court in Boston, Mass. Bruce Singal, the attorney for Barry J. Cadden, wrote that the original nine-year sentence imposed by U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns met the requirements of law and should not be increased to 17.5 years as proposed by federal prosecutors.
The filing comes ahead of a July 7 hearing before Stearns who was ordered by the !st Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider the sentences he originally imposed on Cadden and co-defendant Glenn Chin.
The Cadden brief, much like one already filed in Chin's behalf, argues that several sentencing enhancements sought by federal prosecutors are not justified. Those include additional punishment because the victims were not "unusually vulnerable."
Noting that Cadden was not the physician who injected contaminated drugs into the patients, the brief states that Cadden didn't even know who the patients were.
Cadden and Chin were among 14 people connected to the now defunct New England Compounding Center who were indicted in late 2014 following a two year probe of the deadly 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak. Cadden was president and part owner of NECC while Chin was a supervising pharmacist.
The steroids shipped by NECC in 2012 were riddled with a deadly fungus that traveled up the spines of unsuspecting victims causing death and serious injury.
The Cadden brief charges that it was Chin who failed to act to ensure that the methylprednisolone acetate was sterile.
Citing internal memos that became public during Cadden's 10-week trial, the brief states that Cadden sought to make NECC "bulletproof" by ordering additional testing and faulting Chin for not doing so.
Cadden's sentence, the brief states, should not be increased because prosecutors failed to prove that Cadden acted in reckless disregard of the risk of death or serious injury to patients treated with NECC drugs.
"The government significantly overstates Cadden's relevant conduct," the filing continues, adding that based on past history Cadden had every reason to believe the drugs being shipped out in 2012 were sterile.
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