Atlanta Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog
Yesterday, I concluded my case where we represented the Defendant in what seems to be the very first federal criminal prosecution for selling the prescription drug “Adderall”. Early in the case, the prosecutor (and the probation officer) argued that the Sentencing Guidelines for this crime exceeded 10 years. Later, we got them down to 57-71 months. We filed an aggressive Sentencing Memorandum (Download file) arguing that the Guidelines and the whole case was far out of line. Yesterday, a United States District Judge sitting in Brooklyn, New York agreed with us, refused to put our client in jail, and imposed a sentence of 6 months home confinement.
We live in a pill-popping culture where pharmaceutical companies create more and more drugs that they claim we “need” to survive. Adderall is a drug prescribed mostly for Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. It is well-known that this drug is often used, traded and sold by college students as a “study aid.” More and more professionals use the drug to get through a big test or hard and stressful workload. Some stories have called it “Ivy League Crack.”
Our client wanted to go to medical school. She had a romantic relationship with a medical doctor, who wrote Adderall prescriptions to supposedly “help” her study for the MCAT’s. The doctor came up with the bright idea of writing more and more Adderall prescriptions, and then selling the excess pills to other Yuppies through Craiglist. He had our client fill most of the prescriptions, and showered her with gifts and trips using the proceeds. The couple broke up, he got busted, and turned on our client, resulting in her arrest as she got off a plane here in Atlanta. The case was prosecuted in the Eastern District of New York, where the doctor had been doing his medical residency.
This case is a perfect example of how recent societal trends show up in our federal criminal cases. We are glad that the sentencing judge understood and accepted our basic premise that sending this young woman to prison makes no sense. We hope that other people caught up in such situations look for attorneys who know the federal system well enough to navigate through these difficult cases.