LOS ANGELES, Feb 5 (Reuters) – A Southern California doctor was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison on Friday for over-prescribing drugs that caused the fatal overdose of three patients in a murder case capped by the first conviction of its kind in the United States.
The case against Dr. Hsiu Ying “Lisa” Tseng, 46, comes amid what public health officials describe as a national epidemic of drug abuse. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said the trend is fueling nearly 17,000 overdose deaths annually, as well as a rise in heroin addiction.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court jury in October convicted Tseng, who specialized in internal medicine, of three counts of second-degree murder in a case prosecutors said showed she put greed above patients’ wellbeing.
She was also found guilty of 19 counts of unlawfully prescribing a controlled substance and one count of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud.
Under the sentence imposed on Friday, Tseng must serve at least 30 years in prison before she is eligible for parole. She has been in custody since March 2012.
Criminally prosecuting physicians for patients’ deaths is relatively rare, with one notable case being the 2011 involuntary manslaughter conviction of Dr. Conrad Murray for giving pop star Michael Jackson a fatal dose of a surgical anesthetic to help him sleep.
Prosecutors said Tseng’s conviction, the culmination of a six-week trial, marked the first time in which a U.S. physician was found guilty of murder for over-prescribing drugs.
Licensed to practice in 1997, Tseng opened a storefront medical office in 2005 in Rowland Heights, a hillside community east of Los Angeles that is home to many upper-middle-class and wealthy immigrants from China, Taiwan and South Korea.
At the trial, prosecutors pointed to nine overdose deaths associated with Tseng’s practice in less than three years, during which they said she had made $5 million from her clinic, dispensing potent, addictive medications to people who did not need them.
The drugs included powerful narcotics such as oxycodone, methadone and hydrocodone, and sedatives like Xanax and Valium.
She was convicted in the 2009 deaths of three patients – Vu Nguyen, 28, Steven Ogle, 24, and Joseph Rovero, 21. None resided anywhere near Rowland Heights, and one, Rovero, was an Arizona State University student from the San Francisco area.
Tseng, who received her medical degree from Michigan State University, surrendered her medical license prior to arrest. Her federal license to prescribe drugs was revoked. (Reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Alistair Bell and Dan Grebler)
California doctor gets landmark overdose.
30 years to Life in case!
Hope they serve kum pow chicken in prison!
Gotta love them dress blues.
He was so good in math too!
Don’t know what happened….?
Don’t do drugs!
That’s all I can say.
maybe he can put those skills to good use while hes in there and….never mind
That seems to me like a very unjust verdict. I won’t defend her greed or lack of concern for those patients, but unless she intended for those people to die, she didn’t murder them.
Of course there’s also the question of why these drugs need to be prescribed in the first place. Adults shouldn’t require government permission (even if delegated to doctors) to put substances into their own bodies. It’s MY body, and I can put into it whatever I like. If I do something stupid and die from it, then that’s my fault and my responsibility.
Here is what she is guilty of…….killing those patients too quickly so as to make it blatantly obvious prescription meds are a danger……stay away from those whitecoats!
its like the invisible hand that controls it all and no matter which way you turn they got every field covered
those at the top sure have quite the racket going on
they got everyone at every level controlling each other and keeping them busy so as not to notice somethings not quite right with the system that’s in place
look what the roman church was able to pull off even back then
now imagine how much more intellectually superior these people are now
they got this shit down to a science
even they probably get bored with it and have to come up with new ways to put the screws to people
one example would be the endless rediculous new laws every year
that’s my rant for the day
Excellent!
Another murderer exposed & dealt with.
I would have ‘voted’ for the death penalty.
Put them in a padded cell and the only food they get is water and all the different pills they prescribed to their patients.
There ya go….
Hell put a YouTube cam in there too..!
Never seen Chinese eat they’re own plastic prison cells b4.
Throw some mustard sauce and sweet and sour smeared on the ceiling.
See if they can get high enough to get to it.
Maybe obomba-Barry Sotero our muslim pres will let her out early as this was non violent..Always sock it 2 the ladies going to the joint..This dr looks like a woman to me..30 year sentence pure d bull shi$$$..Gotta give the gals more time 4 some strange reason..This angers me..Our failure president let out 6,000 non violent drug offenders..What a Guy…The people who died were probably being pigs in other words, Taking lots of their meds..NOT Her fault..
“The people who died were probably being pigs in other words, Taking lots of their meds..NOT Her fault..”
EXCUSE ME? NOT HER FAULT???
The b#tch MURDERED them just as surely as if she had pulled the trigger of a gun. Since she (laughingly) passes herself off as a ‘health care professional’, it’s UP TO HER to do the research on ANYTHING she tells her patients is safe to put in their bodies. Big Pharma dispenses nothing BUT toxic substances, whether slow-kill (mostly) or quick. You’ve got a helluva lot of nerve coming here and defending what we all know to be a murder-for-profit/depopulation organization (again, laughingly) known as the ‘medical profession’. These scumbags murdered my mother AND sister with their toxic ‘treatments’ (NOT CURES, that why they’re called ‘TREATMENTS’), so I have nothing but utter contempt for them. And for you as well, if you insist on defending their criminal activity.
“Our failure president let out 6,000 non violent drug offenders.”
They never should have been incarcerated in the first place, moron. Who the hell is the so-called ‘government’ to say WHAT WE CAN OR CANNOT DECIDE TO PUT IN OUR OWN DAMN BODIES??? ANSWER ME THAT, BOZO!!! It’s not only none of THEIR damn business, it’s also none of MINE or YOURS, EITHER!
Get your sorry communist POS self back to whatever commie site you came from, @sswipe. Trenchers do NOT acquiesce to the communist so-called ‘government’s’ rules of slavery.
Kick rocks, b#tch.
ONE OF THESE “DOCTORS” KILLED MY FIRST COUSIN WHO BY THE WAY WAS A CHILD…….. THE LORD PAY HER FOR HER WORK……..