RICHMOND, Va. — A Virginia doctor who was sentenced to 40 years in prison after prescribing more than half a million doses of highly addictive opioids in two years has been granted a new trial by a federal appeals court, which ruled that the instructions given to jurors given during his trial were contrary to the law. .
Joel Smithers was convicted in 2019 of more than 800 counts of illegally prescribing drugs.
During his trial, prosecutors said patients from five states drove hundreds of miles to visit him to get prescriptions for oxycodone, fentanyl and other powerful painkillers. Authorities said Smithers ran a drug distribution ring that contributed to the opioid abuse crisis in Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.
In a ruling Friday, a three-judge panel of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Smithers’ convictions and ordered a new trial.
Jurors at Smithers’ trial were instructed that in order to find Smithers guilty of illegally prescribing drugs, they must find that he did so “without a legitimate medical purpose or outside the bounds of medical practice.”
But the appeals court ruled that that jury instruction was improper, citing a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said a suspect must “knowingly or intentionally” act in an impermissible manner to be guilty of that charge. Although the jury convicted Smithers in 2019, his case fell under the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision because his appeal was still pending when that ruling was made.
Judge Roger Gregory, who wrote the 3-0 opinion for the 4th Circuit panel, cited Smithers’ testimony at his trial when he said that almost all of his patients had been in serious car or workplace accidents and that he believed there was a legitimate medical purpose. for each of the recipes he wrote. Gregory wrote that while “a jury may not have believed Smithers’ testimony that he acted for a legitimate medical purpose,” the defense presented evidence that could have led to an acquittal on each of the unlawful distribution charges against Smithers. .
“In short, because there was evidence upon which a jury could have reached a contrary conclusion, the instructional errors were not harmless,” Gregory wrote.
During Smithers’ trial, a receptionist testified that patients had to wait up to noon to see Smithers, who sometimes kept his office open until after midnight. Smithers did not accept insurance and confiscated nearly $700,000 in cash and credit card payments over two years, prosecutors said.
“We understand the Fourth Circuit’s decision following a recent change in the law and look forward to retrying the defendant,” U.S. Attorney Christopher Kavanaugh said in a statement Monday.
Beau Brindley, an attorney for Smithers, said that since the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, “only one thing determines a doctor’s guilt or innocence: his own subjective views about his prescriptions.”
“Under this new legal standard, which now focuses solely on his intentions, Dr. Smithers looks forward to being fully acquitted at trial,” Brindley said in a statement.
