Pubdate: Wed, 08 Feb 2006
Source: Ledger, The (FL)
Copyright: 2006 The Ledger
Contact:  http://www.theledger.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/795
Author: Mitch Stacy, The Associated Press
Note: Richard Paey Legal Defense Fund 
http://www.november.org/cartoons/DonateForm.html
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/people/Paey (Richard Paey)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?232 (Chronic Pain)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/oxycontin.htm (Oxycontin/Oxycodone)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)

ACCIDENT VICTIM APPEALS DRUG-SALE CONVICTION

Man in Wheelchair Needs Painkillers to Function, His Supporters Say	

TAMPA -- Supporters say Richard Paey was a wheelchairbound man in
constant, brutal pain who needed large amounts of prescription
narcotics just to live a normal life. Prosecutors say he sought way
too many of those often-abused painkillers and that makes him a criminal.

On Tuesday, as Paey's lawyer tried to persuade the 2nd District Court
of Appeal in Lakeland to throw out his 2004 drug trafficking
convictions and mandatory 25-year sentence, advocates for chronic pain
sufferers said the case illustrates flaws in the law and how people
who are dependent on strong pain medication can get tangled up in the
government's overzealous war on drugs.

"I don't think anybody ever thought the war on drugs was going to mean
a war on pain patients and their doctors, but that is in fact what it
has meant," said Siobhan Reynolds of the Pain Relief Network, an
advocacy group that is helping with Paey's appeal.

Paey is a 47-year-old former lawyer and father of three who suffered a
serious back injury in a 1985 car accident and since has been
diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He was left in a wheelchair and in
constant agony.

Nothing blunted the pain -- he has described it as feeling like his
legs were on fire -- except strong narcotics like Percocet and
Vicodin, which he bought from pharmacies in numbers that got the
attention of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and local
authorities.

Prosecutors said he was forging prescriptions and getting so many
pills that he had to be selling them, even though investigators'
two-month surveillance turned up nothing and there was no other
evidence supporting that claim. Paey said that because doctors in
Florida were reluctant to prescribe medication in the amounts he
required, he got his former doctor in New Jersey to send him undated
prescriptions he could fill here.

The doctor testified at the trial that he had never authorized the
number of the pills Paey bought, even though other evidence
contradicted him. A jury convicted Paey of 15 counts of prescription
forgery, unlawful possession of a controlled substance and drug
trafficking. The judge imposed the minimum mandatory sentence of 25
years.

Paey's wife, Linda, said her husband was offered plea deals that would
have kept him out of prison. But he rejected them because he didn't
think he had done anything wrong and shouldn't have to live with the
conviction and label of drug trafficker.

"I think they expected most of these drug-war type of victims to take
a plea, and they were absolutely shocked that he wouldn't take it,"
she said. "He thought he was going to win."

On Tuesday, his lawyer, John P. Flannery, told the three-judge
appellate panel that the 25-year mandatory sentence was cruel and
unusual punishment. Further, Flannery said, the doctor lied on the
witness stand and the prosecutor knew it.

Flannery told the judges that Paey is now getting pain relief in
prison, via a morphine drip.

"It's amazing to me that the Florida prison understands what the
Florida prosecutor does not," he said.

Assistant Attorney General John W. Klawikofsky defended the conviction
and sentence, saying that the evidence seized from Paey's house
amounted to "a little prescription factory."

The law, he said, dictates that someone who has a large number of
pills is considered to be trafficking, even if there is no evidence of
sale. Paey at one point got 800 pills containing oxycodone in 11/2
months, when just 100 would have been enough to charge him with
trafficking, Klawikofsky said.

The appeals court did not indicate when it would rule.