![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
And once again the War on Drugs creates a new innocent casualty. A lawyer with a severe disability resulting in serious chronic pain was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned for 25 years for legally possessing and using prescription pain medication in a case that included coerced perjury and falsified evidence by federal law enforcement, and one of the most spectacular legal blunders in recent history.
Cruel and Unusual: 25 Years for Taking Own Pain Meds
Excerpts:
"But they did manage to convince his New Jersey doctor-- who Paey claims authorized his prescriptions-- to testify that, in fact, Paey was forging them. The doctor was told that he would face a similarly lengthy prison sentence for trafficking if he'd authorized such high doses for a patient who had moved from New Jersey to Florida."
"To add to the exquisite ironies of the case, the reason Paey qualified for such a lengthy sentence was due largely to his possession of acetaminophen (Tylenol), not opioids. Paey was taking pills that included acetaminophen and oxycodone-- but the state counted the weight of the acetaminophen towards the weight of illegal drugs when it determined the charges that led to his sentence."
"In a letter to the governor requesting clemency, Paey's attorney, John Flannery, wrote, 'In more than thirty years of practice as an appellate law clerk in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and a federal prosecutor and as a practicing appellate and trial lawyer, I have never seen an opinion such as this in which the Court agreed the sentence was wrong but could not agree on how to correct it.'"
Cruel and Unusual: 25 Years for Taking Own Pain Meds
Excerpts:
"But they did manage to convince his New Jersey doctor-- who Paey claims authorized his prescriptions-- to testify that, in fact, Paey was forging them. The doctor was told that he would face a similarly lengthy prison sentence for trafficking if he'd authorized such high doses for a patient who had moved from New Jersey to Florida."
"To add to the exquisite ironies of the case, the reason Paey qualified for such a lengthy sentence was due largely to his possession of acetaminophen (Tylenol), not opioids. Paey was taking pills that included acetaminophen and oxycodone-- but the state counted the weight of the acetaminophen towards the weight of illegal drugs when it determined the charges that led to his sentence."
"In a letter to the governor requesting clemency, Paey's attorney, John Flannery, wrote, 'In more than thirty years of practice as an appellate law clerk in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and a federal prosecutor and as a practicing appellate and trial lawyer, I have never seen an opinion such as this in which the Court agreed the sentence was wrong but could not agree on how to correct it.'"
