Incarceration has at least been delayed for the only current or former sales representative from TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc. to be sentenced to prison in the legal aftermath of the company’s Lupron marketing imbroglio.
Three years after former TAP sales rep Joanne Richardson of Tyngsboro, Mass., was sentenced to prison for six months after being found guilty of lying to a grand jury, her sentence has been vacated by a federal judge in Boston who ruled that her legal counsel during an appeal of her sentencing was “deficient.”
She had been found guilty early in 2004 of lying to a federal grand jury in 2000 about the drugmaker’s gift-giving practices in marketing the prostate cancer drug Lupron. She was sentenced in April 2004, but served no time as her attorneys worked on an appeal.
But a March ruling by Judge William Young in U.S. District Court in Boston vacated the appeal of Richardson’s sentence because her counsel, Chicago attorney Jeremy Margolis, did not file key supplemental briefs in the appellate court.
Young said those briefs would have referred to U.S. vs. Booker, a U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave judges more flexibility at sentencing rather than binding them to rigid federal guidelines. Young said he was astonished that Margolis did not file the briefs because the Booker ruling came shortly after Richardson’s appeal hearing.
“The scale and scope of the Booker sea change was of such magnitude that Margolis’ failure to file a supplemental brief was objectively unreasonable,” Young said in his ruling.
Margolis, of Chicago law firm Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, had no comment on Young’s ruling. It is unclear whether Richardson could still be resentenced, according to court documents. However, no sentencing date has been scheduled since Young’s ruling.
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TAP is a joint venture of North Chicago-based drug giant Abbott Laboratories and Japanese drugmaker Takeda Pharmaceutical Co .
In 2001, TAP resolved criminal and civil allegations brought by the Justice Department by paying a settlement of more than $880 million and pleading guilty to a criminal charge of conspiring with doctors to bill government insurers for free samples of Lupron.
In 2004, 11 current and former TAP Lupron sales managers were acquitted or had federal charges dismissed in a bribes-for-prescription case that followed a three-month trial. A 12th TAP sales manager had a guilty plea to charges similar to those on trial set aside by a federal judge.
Another former sales rep was sentenced in 2002 to probation for illegally giving drug samples to a doctor.
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