Dr. Roger Pellmann is Innocent!

I surrendered to federal custody on November 15, 2010.  As you might imagine, looking forward to serving a certain period of incarceration is a miserable thing to have hanging over your head.  And as 2010 was coming to an end I was increasingly anxious to have my term of imprisonment underway--certainly I didn't envision a happy and joyous holiday.  My daughter looked about a year-and-a-half pregnant although not due until mid-January.  I wanted to get my prison sentence done, and get home to my expanding family.  On December 23 my daughter gave birth to the Bad Lawyer's first grandson!  He's a wonderful little Bad Baby Boy! 

So the BSL (Blond Super Lawyer) dropped me off in front of the federal courthouse in OurTown where I promptly surrendered to US Marshal custody.  In case you are wondering, I don't recommend this technique of self-surrender.  Had I been patient I would have received a nice little letter from the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirming my reservations for FCI, Morgantown and I could have driven myself to Morgantown and "self-surrendered" at the camp.  Oh, no, Mr. Bad Lawyer had to turn his badness in to the guys with the shackles and shotguns.  And by 4 AM the next morning I was dumped in a 3-man cell with two, not very happy, 20-something gangsters (Bloods) from Buffalo and Pittsburgh in a cell block at the Youngstown, Ohio Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) facility.  I had arrived in a medium to high security private prison contracted to the US Marshal's for temporary custody of inmates.  This would prove to be not good.

I'll write at length about this CCA-scam, um, system, but for now that's all prelude to telling you about how I ended up at FCI, Morgantown and specifically how it is that I came to meet the Milwaukee, Wi-area physician, Roger Pellmann, M.D.  As the title of this post says, I came to believe that Dr. Roger Pellmann is innocent and more importantly a victim of a fantastic miscarriage of judgment.  I met Roger on December 15th when after a month at the CCA I was placed on a bus, again in shackles driven to a mysterious staging facility moved to another more secure bus, moved to a tarmac where inmates dressed in purple coffee filter like coveralls climbed down from a ConAir flight from Oklahoma City (don't ask, "diesel therapy" is a topic for another day.)  On the tarmac in Pittsburgh, the inmates from the various flights were sorted among the buses.  Roger stood out in a line of inmates looking a wee bit like a dazed Gene Wilder, (circa Blazing Saddles) shackled but one of the few guys still dressed in street clothes.  Roger shuffled onto the bus and sat next to me for the ride to Morgantown.  We both ended up assigned to the same housing unit. 

At the link you can read John Diedrich's Journal-Sentinel article on Roger's conviction.  Go ahead.  It's an accurate summary of why Roger got on the bus with me to Morgantown.   Roger's doing time for dispensing a "powerful" painkiller to a patient.  Get this, what's even more astonishing, the incredible damning evidence against Roger included photographs of some 14,000 empty ampules of fentanyl that the DEA found around Roger's clinic, car and residence.  According to the J-SOnline article,  Roger was "convicted on 16 counts of dispensing powerful painkillers without a legitimate medical purpose [was] sentenced to four years in federal prison. [Roger Pellman, M.D.] ran the Center for Medical Imaging and Vein and Laser Skin Care Clinics in Germantown, was convicted by a jury of illegally dispensing fentanyl and morphine to a nurse who worked for his clinics in 2009."

What a dirtbag, right?

In fact Roger Pellmann is a sweet, funny, naive, and serious minded multi-board certified physician.  The registered nurse he treated (for free) was his office manager, business associate and girlfriend.  She suffered from trigeminal neuralgia (TN) also called the suicide disease which his nurse developed in a following a botched oral surgery.  That's right folks, untreated,  many TN patients kill themselves.  At the link you can read the Wikipedia entry for TN.  I urge you to read about the complex signs and symptoms for TN and the recommended care for the condition. 

So Roger treats his friend, when lo and behold the patient's sister in law puts the squeeze on Roger for some recreational pain meds, I suppose on the theory of since you're handing 'em out ot my sister-in-law how 'bout me too?  Roger refused. The offended sister-in-law-from-hell goes to the DEA.  I myself have speculated that the good folks at the DEA when presented with this tale of the thousands of ampules of fentanyl came to believe that Dr. Roger Pellmann was running a pill mill.  After a lenghty investigation, the DEA came up with nothing--just this astonishing situation involving a business associate-nurse-girlfriend being treated for this unheard of disorder, TN. 

Now I concede to you on Pellmann's behalf that fentanyl is some pretty heavy stuff.  It's frequently delivered via these patches which until recently (when reconfigured by pharmaceutical companies) could be manipulated to achieve some sort of "high."  That was not the case with the dosages used in Roger's care of his patient.  The reason Roger used 14,000 ampules was that this was low dose delivery.  Added up the equivalent fentanyl used by Roger in the care of his patient over the 8 month added up to a grand total of 4 fentanyl patches--or put another way, a fraction of one dose given to a cancer patient for pain. 
Now remember, Roger was convicted of "dispensing powerful painkillers without a legitimate medical purpose."  How did the government obtain this conviction?  I mean how did the government prove "without a legitimate medical purpose?"  Surely, the Milwaukee jury must have heard from physicians, medical professors, learned experts on pharmacology?  Yes?

No.

The government presented no medical experts, no physicians, no professors, no one qualified or competent to speak to the medical standard of "legitimate medical purpose."  So how did this case get to a jury and more importantly, what "evidence" did the jury base their decision on?  The DEA's photographs of empty ampules of the low dose fentanyl (--imagine if you will lots of little St. Joseph Aspirin bottles) which were artfully posed by DEA agents were submitted at trial and cited by the government in the government's appellate brief.  That's it. 

Here's the thing, I can only bring my Bad Lawyer goggles to this travesty of justice.  As followers of Bad Lawyer know, I practiced civil trial law for 28 years both as a plaintiff and a defense lawyer.  A case like the government's vis-a-vis Roger Pellmann if it had been a medical malpractice case, better yet, a mere whiplash car accident claim--it would not have made it to a jury upon a motion to dismiss.  There was an utter failure of the burden of proof.  And yet a Milwaukee federal Judge and Jury was baffled by bullshit.  The government now contends in their appellate Reply brief that despite an absence of competent and credible medical testimony the Pellmann jury had sufficient lay knowledge to determine whether a "legitimate medical purpose" existed for the dispensing of fentanyl for a patient suffering from Trigeminal Neuralgia.  Right.

So what did all this cost Roger Pellman, his employees, and his patients?  Well it cost Pellmann his freedom, reputation, license, businesses, his family, all of his property, homes, cars, etcetera.  His employees at two separate clinics lost their jobs, and the local government lost the taxes and economic investment in their community.  Roger's children and ex-wife lost child support.  Why? 

Roger Pellmann is innocent.  Seriously, I didn't meet many truly innocent folks at Morgantown, including yours truly, but Pellmann is innocent.  There are a lot of guys at Morgantown and I'm sure, elsewhere, throughout federal and state custody who are badly served by incarceration and particularly by the long and costly warehousing of former professionals and others.  This is something I will want to go on about at some length, as with other subjects.  But the truly innocent are rare.  Roger Pellmann is truly innocent and wrongly convicted. 

I left Morgantown last Wednesday, but Roger's still there.