Aug. 31--A landmark California murder trial underway in Los Angeles Superior Court this week sends an unflinching warning to all doctors.
Opening statements are expected to start as early as Monday in the case of Dr. Hsiu-Ying "Lisa" Tseng. She's the first California doctor ever charged with murdering patients who overdosed merely for prescribing them medication, said Deputy Dist. Atty. John Niedermann, a prosecutor on the case.
"[It's] a big deal," said Steve Smith, who teaches health law at California Western School of Law. The case, he said, tells doctors: "Don't get reckless."
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While the district attorney's office casts the prosecution as a necessary step in curbing the prescription drug overdose epidemic, Smith and other medical and legal experts worry that if Tseng is convicted it will trigger "a chilling effect," in which good doctors will be scared to prescribe painkillers to patients, who will suffer unnecessarily.
Doctors have long faced the threats of malpractice lawsuits and losing their medical licenses, but it's still relatively rare for physicians to be held criminally accountable for patient deaths. A handful of doctors across the country have faced murder charges for prescribing painkillers that killed patients, including a Florida doctor currently on trial in a first-degree murder case.
In 2011, a Los Angeles County jury convicted Dr. Conrad Murray of involuntary manslaughter -- a lesser charge than Tseng's -- for giving pop music legend Michael Jackson a dose of propofol, a surgical anesthetic, which killed him.
But prosecutors have charged Tseng, 45, who ran a storefront medical office in Rowland Heights, with second-degree murder in connection with the overdose deaths of Vu Nguyen, 28, of Lake Forest; Steven Ogle, 25, of Palm Desert; and Joey Rovero, 21, an Arizona State University student, who prosecutors say traveled with friends from Tempe, Ariz., to get prescriptions from Tseng.
A 2010 Times investigation found that at least eight of her patients died of overdoses from the same type of drug she prescribed to them.
"Enough is enough," then-Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said after Tseng's 2012 arrest. "Doctors are not above the law."
Tseng's attorney, Tracy Green, says her client shouldn't be held responsible for her patients' decisions. Tseng should never have been charged with murder, Green said, because she didn't act with malice.
April Rovero, the mother of one of the victims, said she hopes Tseng is convicted and a message spreads to every doctor's office in the country: "Don't think you're going to get away with it."
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