Lonoke County 'Pill Mill' Case Set for March

Richard Johns, the suspended Little Rock physician charged with running a “pill mill” of fraudulent painkiller prescriptions, last week got the answer he was led to expect: The charges against him will not be dismissed by the judge and his claim that evidence was collected illegally was rejected. U.S. District Judge Brian Miller, the chief federal judge for the Eastern District of Arkansas, had telegraphed as much when he held a pretrial hearing on Jan. 23. So, as of Thursday afternoon, Johns and his multiple co-defendants were scheduled for trial on March 27. Exactly how many defendants will still be standing by then is anyone’s guess. In the beginning — in September 2015, when a case originally filed in Lonoke County was taken over by the U.S. attorney’s office — Johns was charged in a conspiracy with 18 others. One defendant was dismissed back in September, and since then six others have pleaded guilty. (The first to take a plea, Vanessa E. Byrd, was sentenced last month to 37 months in prison plus three years of supervised release.) Four more are scheduled for pleas on March 10. One of them is David LaRue Scroggins, who is described in court documents as the person who provided Johns with names and birthdates of people for whom Johns would write prescriptions for Oxycodone. Scroggins allegedly paid Johns $500 for each prescription of 90 pills. The pills were then resold for about $30 each, according to an affidavit filed by Detective Cl...
Source: Arkansas Business - Health Care - Category: American Health Source Type: news