Feb 6, 2006 Editorial St. Petersburg Times (FL)

Richard Paey, the Pasco County man serving a 25-year mandatory sentence for possessing large quantities of pain medication, has become a celebrity of sorts. He was recently featured on the television news show 60 Minutes, and his case has been taken up by John Tierney, a New York Times op-ed columnist.

Why this national interest? Because Paey is not a drug pusher. He is a wheelchair-bound patient with chronic pain who may have acted illegally to obtain medicine but has been treated by the criminal justice system as if he were a drug kingpin. His brutally long sentence is an injustice that needs to be corrected.

On Tuesday, the 2nd District Court of Appeal will hear oral arguments in Paey’s appeal on his multiple convictions on drug trafficking, prescription tampering and possession charges. He was convicted of drug trafficking, not because there was any direct evidence that Paey sold the Percocet (which is 98.5 percent Tylenol) and other pills that he hoarded. To the contrary, law enforcement personnel tracked Paey for months, searched his home and found nothing to indicate that Paey resold any of the medicine. The state’s harsh drug laws label anyone possessing more than 28 grams of pills containing a controlled substance a trafficker, then dictate a draconian mandatory minimum sentence that strips judges of any discretion to offer leniency.

It is true that Paey may have tampered with prescriptions to ensure a steady supply of medication, though he denies doing so. He says his doctor was threatened with prosecution if he didn’t say what prosecutors wanted him to say. Part of Paey’s appeal is that the verdict is grounded on the doctor’s perjured testimony. But even if Paey is guilty of this act, a proportional response is probation or maybe limited house arrest, not decades behind bars. The governor’s daughter, Noelle Bush, was also guilty of prescription tampering. She received a referral to a drug treatment program.

Because drugs like OxyContin are abused by addicts, chronic pain patients, of which there are 55-million in this country, have a terrible time finding doctors willing to prescribe enough medicine to relieve their suffering. There are certainly doctors who are conduits for illicit drug sales, but too many legitimate pain doctors have been investigated by the DEA and other policing agencies for providing their patients with relief in a way that law enforcement thinks is too generous. It is an utter failure of common sense and compassion.

Paey is in excruciating pain due to multiple sclerosis, a car accident and botched back surgery. Prison doctors have attended to his pain by attaching him to a morphine pump that supplies him with larger doses of a controlled substance than the amount for which he was prosecuted.

Paey is appealing his conviction on a variety of technical grounds that the court will have to examine for their relative merits. He also is challenging his sentence as an excessive punishment, claiming that his 25-year sentence is so grossly disproportionate to the offense that it violates due process. Here, he has more than a good legal point. He has right on his side.

State prosecutors gave Paey the chance to avoid jail time and he refused to take the plea. That was bad judgment on Paey’s part. But prosecutors need to stop punishing Paey for this lapse and start seeing the case from a less legalistic vantage. Just as victims of torture will say anything to stop the pain, so will patients in agony do anything for relief. The system should be looking to help people in Paey’s condition, not snare them in a legal net created to imprison the real menaces to society.

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/02/06/Opinion/ Of_pain_and_punishment.shtml