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| Photo Credit: AP. |
The US Supreme court Monday sided with two doctors who were convicted for over-prescribing opioid medications that has contributed significantly to America’s drug crisis. The Monday decision came after the doctors challenged their convictions on drug distribution charges for their role in overprescribing pain relief medications.
The court
which was unanimous in ruling for the two doctors were split 6-3 on some legal
issues in the decision, The Hill reports. The justices did not overturn the
convictions but instead sent them back to the lower courts to reexamine the
legal challenge as it relates to Monday’s decision.
According to
The Hill, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the decision for the majority, ruling
that in cases where someone who is authorized to prescribe medication is being
prosecuted under the Controlled Substances Act, prosecutors must prove “beyond
a reasonable doubt that the defendant knowingly or intentionally acted in an
unauthorized manner.”
“We normally
would not view such dispensations as inherently illegitimate; we expect, and
indeed usually want, doctors to prescribe the medications that their patients
need,” Breyer wrote, according to The Hill. In every “prosecutions, then, it is
the fact that the doctor issued an unauthorized prescription that renders his
or her conduct wrongful, not the fact of the dispensation itself. In other
words, authorization plays a ‘crucial’ role in separating innocent conduct—and,
in the case of doctors, socially beneficial conduct—from wrongful conduct.”
Chief Justice
John Roberts also joined in the opinion as well as justices Sonia Sotomayor,
Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, according to The Hill.
The two
doctors Xiulu Ruan and Shakeel Kahn, allegedly ran lucrative “pill mills,”
flooding their patients with prescriptions for fentanyl and other serious pain
management medications, according to prosecutors.
Ruan and Khan are facing up to 20 years in prison after their conviction.