“The errors were clerical and misstatements in dictation which isn’t a crime.”
Sumvun did nawt cross ze T or dot ze I on page three, your papers ar nawt in order!
If the minor clerical errors are not crimes, why was the judge persuaded by the DOJ to find him guilty and impose a jail sentence on him? Liberal Judge? Or could it be that the doctor wasn’t the right race and didn’t fall under Eric “The RED” Holder’s “JUST US” department standards?
Why should a superb surgeon be in jail for a couple of clerical errors? Just another example of the tyrannical nature of this administration.
Petition signed.
Thank you.
This sounds like a case of the bully entering the room and going after one person in order to send a message to the rest of the people in the room.
The amount of regulations and overhead doctors have to comply with is mind boggling.
The same “justice” department that refused to prosecute election intimidation because the head of the department felt that the perps were “his people?”
It’s a good thing there weren’t any dangling participles in his reports.
I know that if a prosecutor wants to convict of medicare fraud, it's just a matter of looking long enough and deep enough and you will find an error.
Any error then can be compounded into multiple charges that include wire fraud as the banking portion of getting paid invariably crosses state lines.
This is not just true of physicians, almost anyone can be convicted of something if examined close enough. There are thousands of laws on the books and we all have violated some law somewhere unknowingly.
On the other hand I have also been involved with removing unethical physcians from a hospital practice.
When examining the records only the most egregious of records are forwarded to prosecutors for action.
It is impossible to know which of these is what has happened to this physician.
There are doctors who file false medicare reports to cheat the government. It certainly doesn’t sound as if Natale was one of them. It sounds as if he is a really splendid doctor who understandably made a couple of errors in thousands of reports. Big deal.
Maybe two doctors with influence on high went after him because they were jealous. Maybe the government was angry because he saved the lives of numerous patients who were scheduled to die—which is what the government usually wants when it gets involved with these things.
In any case, the petition certainly deserves to be signed.
No, we don’t know EVERYTHING about this case, but this is a clear example of judicial injustice.
A similar case of government tyranny lead to the suicide of Aaron Swartz:
see:
Aaron’s Law
It won’t bring him back. But the loss of the Internet activist has prompted a bill in Congress that would protect others from the same kind of prosecutorial abuse.
...
But now Congress may actually do something to remedy at least part of this important flaw. Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) has introduced a draft bill — importantly, first on Reddit, a platform Aaron had helped to build, and, once she gets the Net’s feedback, in the United States Congress — to change this rule of the CFAA and return contract law to its civil home. Her bill, which she calls “Aaron’s Law,” would limit the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and exclude “crimes” that are nothing more than a breach of contract. No more “felonies.” No more prosecutions resulting in prison sentences. Violations of the “terms of service” would be a breach, not a crime. Had that change been made before Aaron’s death, the government’s felony charges would likely have collapsed. Had the government’s charges collapsed, Aaron Swartz, in my view, would still be frantically working to make the world a better place.
..
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/13/01/aarons-law/267247/#
I don’t know. In my experience when something sounds too bad to be true it usually isn’t.
I would bet you 50 cents that there is at least one pertinent fact missing from this narrative.
Wait a minute. The jury found no fraud had been committed, yet the judge sentenced him? How can this be?
Where the F**& is Congress?? You CANNOT put a Person in JAIL for NOT committing a Crime?? This Judge should have already been brought up for impeachment. Welcome to Nazi Germany Folks.