BOSTON - A former Massachusetts pharmacy executive who was convicted of
racketeering and fraud charges for his role in a deadly US meningitis
outbreak in 2012 is scheduled to be sentenced on Monday.
Barry Cadden, the co-founder and former president of the
now-defunct New England Compounding Centre, was convicted in March of those
crimes by a federal jury in Boston
but cleared of the harshest charges he faced, second-degree murder.
Prosecutors are seeking at least 35 years in prison for
Cadden, whose conduct they said led to 778 patients nationwide being harmed
after receiving contaminated steroids injections. That includes 76 people who
died, they said.
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His lawyers counter that prosecutors are seeking to demonize
Cadden, who they said was not convicted of knowing the drugs were contaminated,
just of misrepresenting how they were made. They say Cadden, 50, deserves
around only three years in prison.
Cadden was one of 14 people tied to Framingham, Massachusetts-based
New England Compounding Centre (NECC) indicted in 2014 following the outbreak.
He was one of only two people to face second-degree murder charges.
Prosecutors said Cadden, NECC's head pharmacist, ran the
company as a criminal enterprise that sold substandard and non-sterile drugs
produced in filthy conditions and shipped to medical facilities nationally for
use on unsuspecting patients.
They said Cadden directed the shipment of 17,600 vials of
contaminated steroids often prescribed for back pain despite knowing they were
made in unsafe conditions, leading to the outbreak.