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Richard Paey Granted Full Pardon!
Richard Paey Is Finally Free! Paey, serving 25 years in prison for "illegal prescriptions", was granted a full pardon by Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida and the Florida Clemency Board on September 20, 2007.
Free Days For Richard Paey; from Tampa Bay Online (FL), 11/1/08
Pardoned Man Thankful To Be With Loved Ones; from Tampa Tribune (FL), 11/23/07
Richard Paey Speaks; from Reason Online (US Web), 11/20/07
King Of Pain; from Creative Loafing Tampa (FL), 11/14/07
Paey Starts Afresh With Call From Crist; from St. Petersburg Times (FL), 9/22/07
At Long Last, Free Man Can Look Up; from Tampa Tribune (FL), 9/22/07
Report: Richard Paey Is Free! from November Coalition (US), 9/21/07
Full Pardon Begins To Ease Man's Pain; from St. Petersburg Times (FL), 9/21/07
State Grants Clemency On 25-Year Sentence; from Tampa Tribune (FL), 9/21/07
Pain Sufferer Wins Pardon In Drug Case; from Miami Herald (FL), 9/20/07
Paey Given Full Pardon; Crist Orders Him Freed Today; from St. Petersburg Times (FL), 9/20/07 -- More on Richard PaeyRichard suffers from intractable pain caused by multiple sclerosis and failed spine surgery. He is serving 25 years in a Florida State Prison for "illegal prescriptions". According to the prosecutor, the prescriptions were illegal simply because they had been written or issued 6 weeks after Richard's last medical exam. It was still drug trafficking, the jury was told.
June 15, 2007 - The Florida Parole Commission has recommended that Gov. Charlie Crist consider Paey's clemency petition.
This is unusual because Richard hasn't served a third of his sentence yet. If you have done work to support Richard Paey's release -- he and his family send their thanks. They know that without your help, we wouldn't be so hopeful today.
Richard's case "demonstrates extraordinary merit" and so, if you would like to help show the Governor why releasing Richard is the correct thing to do, keep those cards and letters coming. According to John P. Flannery, Richard's attorney, "they are being read and carefully considered by the Office of Executive Clemency."
Column: Disabled Man's Justice May Be Served Cold; from Tampa Tribune (FL), 6/28/07
Clemency Hopes Pinned On Crist; from St. Petersburg Times (FL), 6/22/07
To Write Gov Christ:
The Honorable Charlie Crist
The Capitol 400 South Monroe Street
Tallahassee, Fla. 32399
Phone: 850-488-7146 - Fax: 850-487-0801
E-mail: charlie.crist@myflorida.com
Web: www.flgov.com/gov_contactYou may review a copy of the petition online here, coutesy of Richard's attorney, John P. Flannery (pdf)
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February 2005: Florida Prison, Zephyrhills, FL
Day after day more Americans speak out against the ever escalating War on Drugs. While noble in concept it has been ignominious in application. Our government has seemingly forgot the age old wisdom that in war, the first casualty is always the truth. Florida's attempt to expand the definition of drug trafficking so that patients filling doctors prescriptions are now potential defendants. It doesn't matter the patient had a medical need for the medication.
If the state can show your doctor acted outside the course of their professional practice then the prescriptions are illegal. If the prescriptions are illegal and you have more than 28 grams (50-70 pills) that makes you a drug trafficker. And that's what happened to Richard Paey, a 46 year old family man from Pasco County, Florida. It didn't save him that he suffered from intractable pain caused by multiple sclerosis and failed spine surgery. All that mattered was the State could convince a jury the prescriptions were illegal - even if the illegality was caused by something Richard's doctor did or didn't do.
Here's what happened. To some its another example that the War on Drugs is out-of-control. It may also help explain why "pain is woefully under treated in Florida". The situation is so dire Florida had to pass special legislation to combat the fear of investigation that has caused some doctors to stop treating pain patients (the "chilling effect"). For over 2 1/2 years Richard Paey received prescriptions from his doctor that were filled at local pharmacies. In 1997 Pasco sheriffs started a secret pharmacy surveillance program intended to identify people believed to be taking excessive medication. In the mind of the sheriffs, excessive medication was evidence of a potential crime. How they decided what was excessive, nobody knows, it was a gut determination. Because the deputy believed Richard Paey took excessive medication, police put him under surveillance - for 3 months. They found nothing.
Undeterred by the lack of evidence sheriff's deputy's decided the doctor was also a suspect. Because the doctor continued to authorize prescriptions the sheriff felt they had to approach the doctor with that they called a "ruse"- an intentional lie. They decided to tell the doctor his patient was selling the medication and the doctor faced 25 years in prison for sending the prescriptions to Florida. What did the sheriff expect the doctor to say? With news he faced prosecution (utter ruin) the doctor began to "back pedal". In what police acknowledged was an incredible story, the doctor claimed he had been "lying" when he told pharmacists he wrote the prescriptions. He didn't write them, he said, he didn't know who wrote them, apparently. He had authorized them because he was helping his patient. In short, when told he faced prosecution for writing the prescriptions he told a new story.
Police arrested Richard alleging the prescriptions were illegal because they were not written by the doctor. The fact the doctor made the allegation only after being told he faced prosecution, didn't matter. All that mattered was they had someone to swear to the allegation. Although the state originally alleged the doctor was duped into authorizing prescriptions and lying to pharmacists the state did its own back pedaling when the allegation was recanted by the doctor at trial. Ordinarily recanting an allegation before the jury ends the trial, but not here. The state told the jury they should convict regardless of what the doctor said in court. According to the prosecutor, the prescriptions were illegal simply because they had been written or issued 6 weeks after Richardâ·s last medical exam. It was still drug trafficking, the jury was told.
If you think the prosecution demonstrates the War on Drugs is out-of- control, you won't be surprised by what the jury did during deliberation! When jurors could not agree on a verdict, the persuasive jury foreman told the group it was okay to vote for guilt because he, the jury foreman, knew the defendant would only get probation. Unfortunately, the foreman was terribly wrong. The judge had to impose the mandatory sentence of 25 years.
Today the defendant is housed in a prison infirmary awaiting his appeal. Because he was convicted of drug trafficking, he could not be released pending appeal -like murderers and rapists. He want directly to prison. The drug trafficking statute contains harsh provisions intended to make convictions easier. It did.
Has the War on Drugs gone too far, is it out of control? This case seemingly says YES. Did you know Floridians are suffering unnecessarily because many doctors are afraid of police knocking on their door? According to Florida Hospice, even terminally ill patients are being under treated, a situation attributed directly to overzealous enforcement officers.
Did Florida have to adopt special legislation telling doctors its okay to prescribe to pain patients; that large doses, even over the patients lifetime may be necessary? Has the law alleviated doctor's fears or has the situation gotten worse?
Can juries, should juries decide when your doctors prescriptions is illegal because its "not written in the course of the doctors professional practice"?
If experts in medicine disagree on how much is excessive or whether 6 weeks between visits is too long, how can a jury?
Would you want police to test your doctors courage using a "ruse"? Are the officers overzealous in their pursuit of prosecutions? What is drug trafficking if its not trafficking? Is trafficking filling an prescription made "illegal" by some decision your doctor made?
What should be done to help ensure intractable pain patients can find treatment? Is the current Controlled Substance Act (1970) part of the problem?
Did mandatory minimums help in creating a fair, equitable sentence in Richard's case? According to Richard's attorney, this is the first prosecution of a patient for something his doctor did or didn't do. Was Richard a drug trafficker or a victim?
By Richard V. Paey
April 23, 2004 - Reason Online (US Web)
Pill Sham
A Man Seeking Pain Relief Gets 25 Years For Drug Trafficking
By Jacob Sullum
Here's a bit of legal information that may interest Rush Limbaugh: Under Florida law, illegally obtaining more than 28 grams of painkillers containing the
narcotic oxycodone -- a threshold exceeded by a single 60-pill Percocet prescription -- automatically makes you the worst sort of drug trafficker, even if you never sold a single pill. Even if, like Richard Paey, you were using the drugs to relieve severe chronic pain.
Although prosecutors admitted Paey was not a drug trafficker, on April 16 he received a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years for drug trafficking. That jaw-dropping outcome illustrates two sadly familiar side effects of the war on drugs: the injustice caused by mandatory minimum sentences and the suffering caused by the government's interference with pain treatment.
Paey, a 45-year-old father of three, is disabled as a result of a 1985 car accident, failed back surgery, and multiple sclerosis. Today, as he sits in jail in his wheelchair, a subdermal pump delivers a steady, programmed dose of morphine
to his spine. But for years he treated his pain with Percocet, Lortab (a painkiller containing the narcotic hydrocodone), and Valium prescribed by his doctor in New Jersey, Steven Nurkiewicz.
When Paey and his family moved to Florida in 1994, he had trouble finding a new doctor. Because he had developed tolerance to the pain medication, he needed high doses, and because he was not on the verge of death, he needed them indefinitely. As many people who suffer from chronic pain can testify, both of those factors make doctors nervous, since they know the government is looking over their shoulders while they write prescriptions.
Unable to find a local physician who was comfortable taking him on as a patient, Paey used undated prescription forms from Nurkiewicz's office to obtain painkillers in Florida. Paey says Nurkiewicz authorized these prescriptions, which the doctor (who could face legal trouble of his own) denies.
The Pasco County Sheriff's Office began investigating Paey in late 1996 after receiving calls from suspicious pharmacists. Detectives tracked Paey as he filled prescriptions for 1,200 pills from January 1997 until his arrest that March.
At first investigators assumed Paey must be selling the pills, since they thought the amounts were too large for him to consume on his own. But the police never found any evidence of that, and two years after his arrest prosecutors offered him a deal: If he pleaded guilty to attempted trafficking, he would receive eight years of probation, including three years of house arrest.
Paey initially agreed but then had second thoughts. His wife, Linda, says he worried that he could go to prison if he was accused of violating his probation. More fundamentally, he did not want to identify himself as a criminal when he believed he had done nothing wrong. He has since turned down other plea deals involving prison time.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have pursued Paey in three trials. The first ended in a mistrial; the second resulted in a conviction that the judge threw out because of a procedural error; and the third, which ended last month, produced guilty verdicts on 15 charges of drug trafficking, obtaining a controlled substance by fraud, and possession of a controlled substance.
A juror later told the St. Petersburg Times he did not really think Paey was guilty of trafficking, since the prosecution made it clear from the outset that he didn't sell any pills. The juror said he voted guilty to avoid being the lone holdout. He suggested that other jurors might have voted differently if the foreman had not assured them Paey would get probation.
The prosecutors, who finally obtained the draconian sentence that even they concede Paey does not deserve, say it's his fault for insisting on his innocence. "It's unfortunate that anyone has to go to prison, but he's got no one to blame but Richard Paey," Assistant State Attorney Mike Halkitis told the St. Petersburg Times. "All we wanted to do was get him help."
Paey's real crime, it seems, is not drug trafficking but ingratitude. "My husband was so adamant, and so strongly defending this from the very beginning, that it might have annoyed them," says Linda Paey. "They were extremely upset that he would not accept a plea bargain. They felt that anyone who had any common sense would.... But he didn't want to say he was guilty of something he didn't do."
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (Tarcher/Putnam).
© Copyright 2004 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
April 5, 2004 - The St. Petersburg Times (FL)
From Painkillers To Prison
When the issue of chronic pain intersects with this nation's draconian drug laws, common sense and compassion often take a holiday. Consider the case of Richard Paey, a 45-year-old father of three who sits in a wheelchair, debilitated by multiple sclerosis and chronic pain from botched back surgery, and is now facing a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence for having forged prescriptions to treat his pain.
Paey's case is just one example of the skewed priorities that result from the nation's drug war: Mandatory minimums tie the hands of judges to offer leniency; and the looming threat of prosecution dissuades doctors from aggressively treating pain.
Paey and his wife moved to Florida from New Jersey in 1994. Earlier, a car accident and disastrous back surgery had left him in debilitating pain, putting him on disability. Paey claimed he couldn't find a local doctor to treat him and so his New Jersey physician sent him undated but signed prescriptions for Percocet, Lortab and Valium.
In January 1997, investigators from the Drug Enforcement Administration met with Paey's New Jersey doctor about the illegal prescriptions. When that source dried up, the government says Paey filled old prescriptions he had photocopied. Despite months-long surveillance of Paey's activities, there was never any evidence that he resold the 1,200 painkillers he bought between January and March. It was all apparently for his personal use.
Still, in 1997 he was charged with drug trafficking, among other drug- related crimes.
To the credit of Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney Bernie McCabe, Paey was offered a generous plea deal of house-arrest and probation, but he stubbornly refused it. Later plea offers for a five-year prison sentence were also rejected. Paey didn't feel that medicating his pain should have been a crime.
And he has a point. While altering a prescription is certainly a criminal act, the under-treatment of pain has been a long-running health care problem in this country, now exacerbated by the increased recreational use of prescription medications such as OxyContin. As the DEA and other law enforcement agencies have stepped up their scrutiny of doctors, many have been frightened away from offering their patients aggressive pain treatment.
The result has been making drug traffickers out of patients who doctor shop and engage in other unlawful practices to get sufficient quantities of painkillers. This is an abuse of our criminal justice resources. Paey is not a man who belongs in prison. What he and other pain patients need is a health care system that will respond to their affliction. (Paey now has a morphine pump in his back to dull the pain. His wife says, ironically, it provides him with more narcotics than he was getting from the Percocet, which is 98.5 percent Tylenol.)
But it looks like prison is very much on the horizon. After two trials were set aside due to irregularities, Paey was convicted by a New Port Richey jury last month in a third. He was found guilty of 15 counts of drug trafficking, obtaining a controlled substance by fraud and possession of controlled substances. He faces multiple 25-year mandatory minimum sentences, since Florida's rigid drug laws treat everyone with a certain amount of medicine like a drug dealer. Sentencing is April 16.
Plenty of blame can be spread around for this travesty, including to Paey himself for not taking the initial plea offer, but the drug laws are the main problem. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws result in breathtaking injustices and remain in place because lawmakers refuse to act rationally where drug issues are involved. With the law stripping Florida's judges of discretion, Paey's only hope is another generous plea offer. Otherwise, this man of failing health will probably spend the rest of his years behind bars.
Read more about Richard Paey and the War on Pain Patients:
Sick: A Florida Paraplegic Needs Relief: from National Review (US), 10/24/05
Prisoner Of Pain Becomes Martyr Of Drug War; from Charlotte Observer (NC), 10/20/05
Richard Paey & November Coalition in The New York Times: Op-Ed: Punishing Pain, by John Tierney, July 19, 2005
Mandatory Madness; from The Weekly Planet (FL), 6/18/04
Learn More about the War on Pain Patients at Pain Relief Network
Richard is an accomplished artist: Visit 'Toons By Paey
Updated - 1/24/08
Back to the Wall
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