Dr. Bernard Rottschaefer, the Pittsburgh physician convicted under highly questionable circumstances of illegally prescribing painkillers was resentenced last week.

The new sentence isn’t much better — 5 years in prison for the 64-year-old man. In issuing the new sentence, the judge apparently cited many of the accusations against Rottschaefer, including the drugs-for-sex charge, that have since been disproved. The government has continually moved the goalposts in this case. When, post-trial, the state’s star witness admitted in letters to her boyfriend that she had lied in her testimony about trading oral sex for Oxy scripts, the state insisted that its case was never about drugs for sex (the U.S. attorney’s office’s press conference and news releases to the contrary notwithstanding), but about prescribing painkillers outside the course of normal medical treatment.

Even accepting the premise that drug cops — not doctors — should be determining what is and isn’t “beyond the course of normal medical treatment,” and allowing for the fact that the government has given doctors no firm guidelines on what that standard actually means, even conceding all of that, Rottschaefer shouldn’t have been convicted.

The state’s medical expert, for example, didn’t know some pretty fundamental facts about prescription painkillers (he didn’t know, for example, that scripts for most painkillers can’t be post-dated). He also admitted he hadn’t reviewed the entire medical histories of the patients the state called to testify. Nevertheless, he felt comfortable testifying (in exchange for $12,000) that Rottschaefer was guilty of criminally overprescribing painkillers.

An actual pain specialist who has since reviewed the entire histories of Rottschaefer’s patients has determined that the scripts Dr. Rottschaefer wrote were appropriate. Their prior histories were reason enough, without the need for additional, repetitive testing (Rottschaefer had been seeing some of the women for many years). Moreover, in the subsequent civil suits against Rottschaefer, the doctor’s attorneys have found that the state’s witnesses against him did in fact have conditions that would require pain medication.

In short, since the trial, the state’s case against Rottschaefer has fallen to pieces.

But the appeals courts don’t seem to be all that interested.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 8:14 am 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.