Oral arguments for Dr. Bernard Rottschaefer’s appeal are Friday.

The good news: Rottschaefer is represented by Eli Stutsman, the same lawyer who won the Oregon assisted suicide case before the Supreme Court (and who spoke at Cato’s painkiller conference).

The amusing component to this story is the continued attempts by U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan to justify the fact that her office either suborned perjury or exercised breathtaking ineptitude in the prosecution of Rottschaefer. After Rotschaefer’s prosecution, for example, Buchanan was giddily relaying to reporters the lurid details of the doctor’s alleged “drugs for sex” arrangements. Now that those allegations have been proven false by letters Buchanan’s own star witness wrote to her boyrfriend, Buchanan is insisting that the drugs for sex angle is irrrelevant, and Rottschaefer deserves conviction solely because an “expert witness” produced by the prosecution determined that Rottschaefer’s methods didn’t adequately safeguard against the possibility of diversion. For this, Buchanan wants to put the man in jail for what in all likelihood would be the rest of his life.

Buchanan’s most laughable line comes here, when attempting to explain why she won’t pursue perjury charges against her witness, whose letters explicitly conceded that she had lied under oath in exchange for leniency. Says Buchanan:

“When is the witness more credible — under oath in a federal trial, or trying to convince a boyfriend she wasn’t having sex outside their relationship?” Buchanan said.

That’s one way of putting it. Another might be, “When is the witness more credible — when she’s spilling her guts to a paramour, or when prosecutors have promised her that a certain type of ‘testimony’ will keep her ass out of jail?”

To-may-to. To-mah-to.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 12:42 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Pain Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.