Courtroom 21 was packed. On the seventh floor of the Moakley federal courthouse, opening statements and testimony got underway in the murder and racketeering trial of former pharmacist Barry Cadden.
Cadden was the head pharmacist and co-owner of a compounding pharmacy whose drugs, investigators say, caused a 2012 meningitis outbreak. The outbreak was traced back to steroid injections that were contaminated with mold. 750 people fell sick from the injections. 64 of them died.
According to federal prosecutors, Cadden’s greed drove him to flout regulations. He oversaw a highly unsanitary pharmacy and asked his employees to use expired ingredients. Prosecutors say Cadden knew that medications from his pharmacy could harm or kill patients, yet he still shipped them to doctors around the country.
“[Barry Cadden] prioritized profit over patients,” said prosecutor George Varghase.
Defense attorneys painted a very different picture. Cadden was just one man in a company with about 60 employees. As soon as he realized things were amiss, he acted aggressively to right what was wrong and warn physicians about any problems. The tainted injections were an isolated situation – not something systematic, defense attorneys claimed.
“Of course, mistakes were made. Every business makes mistakes,” said defense attorney Bruce Singal. “Cadden made mistakes. They weren’t criminal. They weren’t murder.”
Cadden faces 97 charges, including second-degree murder for the death of 25 patients. If found guilty, the maximum sentence is life in prison.
The Long-Awaited Trial
The much-anticipated trial is expected to last several weeks and could extend even longer. It got off to a late start as two jurors were stuck on a commuter train experiencing signal delays. Once they arrived, federal prosecutor George Varghase made the first opening statement.
He told the story of two people: Douglas Wingate of Roanoke, VA and Godwin Mitchell of Ocala, FL. Varghase described two men leading active lives when they received the contaminated steroid injections. It wasn’t long before they were both dead. Varghase went on to name all 25 individuals Cadden is accused of killing.
He portrayed Cadden as a callous, greedy man who was intimately involved in every aspect of the New England Compounding Center (NECC), the compounding pharmacy at the center of the case.
“NECC was his baby,” said Varghase. “Everything happened because of Barry. Barry Cadden was NECC.” He argued that Cadden oversaw everything at the compounding pharmacy from the sales pitch to the clean room procedures. And thus, the responsibility rests with Barry Cadden.
Varghase described filthy conditions -- flies and mold in the cleanroom where drugs were made, mice in the building and oil seeping through the floor. And it didn’t stop with cleanliness. Prosecutors presented emails and documents in an effort prove that Cadden had authorized the use of expired ingredients, allowed improper drug testing and let employees fabricate prescriptions.
Varghase said Cadden relabeled expired drug ingredients to make them appear as if they were still usable. Varghase showed email exchanges between Cadden and the supervisory pharmacist, Glenn Chin, who is also charged with second-degree murder. In one email, dated January 9th of 2009, Cadden wrote to Chin about retinoic acid injections. He said to relabel expired ingredients to make them appear usable. “Just relabel the old stuff…it’s not worth the time to make a new lot,” the email read.
When defense attorney Bruce Singal made his statement, he acknowledged that the outbreak and the deaths were a tragedy. “There is no monopoly on empathy in this court room,” Singal said. “Everyone in this courtroom with a beating heart understands how tragic this is.”
However, Singal insisted that “there’s no evidence” to hold Cadden responsible for what happened. He showed video of the cleanroom, explaining how the company went above and beyond what was required by law to make sure the environment was safe.
Singal said that the contaminated vials were an “isolated, aberrational, extraordinarily out of the ordinary” event. He said the pharmacy had a long and reliable safety record, having sent out more than 850,000 uncontaminated vials.
Further, he said that when Cadden found his employees and contractors were not acting properly, he responded quickly. “He’s not sitting back and ignoring it. He’s trying to do something about it, and very aggressively.” In response to evidence of employees keeping inaccurate cleaning logs, Singal said: “Barry is insisting they do it right, and the people in the cleaning room are trying to trick him.
By the end of Monday’s session, the prosecution had called its first witness: Benjamin Park of the CDC. Tomorrow, the trial continues as both sides present further evidence about Barry Cadden’s role in the death of 25 patients.
