Two former pharmaceutical executives federally charged with murdering 25 people with mold-contaminated pain-relief medication have accused prosecutors of “excessive ambition” and are demanding they produce evidence to justify the charge before they go on trial.
Barry Cadden, the former owner of the Framingham-based New England Compounding Center, and Glenn Chin, his supervising pharmacist, have asked U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns to order federal prosecutors to appear at a hearing and declare the evidence they plan to present against them when the case goes before a jury in January so that Stearns can determine if the murder charges should be stricken.
“In its zeal to craft the biggest possible case, the government has overreached with these 25 murder charges. Cadden and Chin should not have to pay an unfair price for the government’s excessive ambition,” defense attorneys Bruce Singal and Stephen Weymouth appealed to Stearns in their motion filed Friday.
Singal and Weymouth tell Stearns they have combed through 12 million pages of documents, 400 government interviews, federal and state health inspection reports and 800 grand jury exhibits connected to the 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak.
“There is no evidence of anything Cadden or Chin did to cause the contamination of these lots, or of the vials from those lots that were injected into these individuals,” the attorneys write.
Saying the feds have created an “untoward scenario” of potentially calling 174 witnesses against their clients during a trial expected to last two to three months, the lawyers said prosecutors should first “be required to proffer the evidence it maintains demonstrates — sufficient to go to the jury — that the defendants Cadden and Chin caused the deaths of the 25 patients they are accused of murdering,” and that they knew the actions they were taking could result in death.
The 25 counts of second-degree murder are charged under the racketeering case brought against Cadden and Chin. Cadden and Chin are additionally charged with fraud and introducing adulterated and misbranded drugs into interstate commerce.
NECC majority owner Carla Conigliaro and her husband, Douglas, whose business provided sales and administrative services to NECC, have already pleaded guilty to charges they tried to hide $124,000 they withdrew from personal bank accounts once law enforcement shut down NECC. The couple are serving terms of probation.
