Posted on 02/05/2016 5:17:28 PM PST by BenLurkin
A Southern California doctor convicted of murder in connection with the overdose deaths of three of her patients was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison Friday by a judge in Los Angeles.
Tseng is the only doctor in the United States to be convicted of murder for recklessly prescribing drugs, said Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney John Niedermann, the lead prosecutor on the case.
While the murder conviction against Tseng is apparently without precedent, her prosecution as a doctor-turned-drug dealer is not.
There has been a steady stream of such cases around the country in recent years. Some have targeted allegedly corrupt doctors on the payroll of criminal "pill mill" operators. Others involve self-employed physicians like Tseng accused of abandoning patient care in pursuit of greed.
...
Prosecutors charged Tseng with second-degree murder for the deaths of Joey Rovero, 21, Steven Ogle, 25, and Vu Nguyen, 28.
Niedermann wrote in court papers that the murder charges were warranted, in part, because Tseng was already on notice about three earlier patient deaths.
Matthew Stavron, Ryan Latham, and Naythan Kenney fatally overdosed in 2007 and 2008 after Tseng prescribed them drugs. The young men each drove long distances to come to Tseng's strip mall clinic for prescriptions. Stavron made a two-hour round trip from his parents' home in San Clemente.
Tseng got a phone call from the coroner's office alerting her to each of the deaths, according to court papers.
Tseng regarded such calls as "just FYI" notices and did not perceive them as a problem, her husband, also a doctor, testified in her defense at trial.
(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...
Waiting for the usual liberaltarians to show up and tell us that drug abuse is a victimless crime.
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Wow. Good luck getting drugs now if you’re in serious pain.
This conviction is absurd. Malpractice or dope dealing OK. But murder?
Every doc will now be afraid of being charged with homicide...
Which is part of why one of my doc friends just sold off her practice and retired. The other part was the impossibility of complying with Obamacare.
I'm surprised that she didn't lose her medical license long before these patients died. Medical licensing boards don't like physician drug dealers.
Evil woman.
It all starts with lawyers.
A guy that should have got some pain medicine didn’t. Big lawsuit with a big payout.
Other lawyers advised hospitals and medical groups they were at serious risk and must devise a system to protect themselves. The solution, pain is the fifth vital sign and pain must always be treated.
A whole generation of docs are brought up in this new world. Lazy docs figured out that the easy way to treat pain is to hand out narcs. Lazy, greedy docs figure out you can make a lot of money handing out scripts for a lot of narcs.
We now live in a narc saturated society, people are dying and the pendulum is now beginning to swing the other directions, in this case the lawyer is a prosecutor but I’m sure a smart lawyer will figure out how to get a class action suit going.
Whose rights were violated?
The parents of the murder victims. The six dead guys. The number of folks turned into addicts by these money grubbing ‘doctors’.
And notice anything about the ‘doctors’ named in the story? Tseng, Yee, Diaz. Don’t see any Smiths or Jones mentioned.
The parents of the murder victims.
Whose rights of theirs were violated? The "murder" "victims" were adults - and could just as easily have drunk themselves to death.
The six dead guys. The number of folks turned into addicts by these money grubbing ‘doctors’.
Nonsense - people who drive for hours to get prescriptions know exactly what they're doing. You might as well claim that McDonalds is a murderer because a customer ate themselves into fatal heart disease.
Wouldn’t manslaughter be more appropriate? This doctor may have been careless or reckless, but I doubt that she was aiming to kill her patients.
Yes, it's obviously those eeeevil furriners doing all this crap.
Doctor cuts tongue of wrong baby
http://canmua.net/tennessee/mixup-leads-to-surgical-procedure-on-wrong-baby-393420.html
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