Pharmacy executives tied to deadly U.S. meningitis outbreak lose appeals
BOSTON (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Thursday cleared the way for prosecutors to seek longer prison sentences for a founder and supervisory pharmacist of a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy whose tainted drugs sparked a deadly fungal meningitis outbreak in 2012.
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston upheld the racketeering and fraud convictions of Barry Cadden, New England Compounding Center’s ex-president, and Glenn Chin, its former supervisory pharmacist.
But the three-judge panel said a trial judge erred in sentencing Cadden, 53, and Chin, 52, to nine and eight years in prison, respectively, when he declined to apply various federal sentencing guideline enhancements.
U.S. Circuit Judge David Barron said the judge, among other things, in calculating a sentence wrongly concluded only the hospitals that bought NECC’s drugs could count as victims and not the patients who used them.
Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by David Gregorio and Daniel Wallis
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-massachusetts-meningitis/pharmacy-executives-tied-to-deadly-u-s-meningitis-outbreak-lose-appeals-idUSKBN24A3F1?il=0