In an unprecedented and, as yet, unexplained move, the U.S. Department of Justice is conceding that a Greeneville oncologist and his office manager wife were wrongfully convicted.
Beth Brinkmann, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department, has filed a motion in the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to vacate the convictions of Dr. Anindya Sen and his wife, Patricia Posey Sen, in a case involving the purchase of cancer drugs from a Canadian supplier.
The move is extraordinary on a number of fronts. It comes after the Sens were publicly accused, tried and sentenced in a case deemed so important U.S. Attorney Bill Killian announced the couple’s indictment and, later, their conviction via news releases. The action to drop the case is being undertaken by the Justice Department’s civil division in Washington, D.C., although it was Killian’s staff who prosecuted the case and normally would have handled the appeal. And, Brinkman wrote in the motion the Justice Department plans to dismiss the case “with prejudice,” meaning it can never be resurrected.
The Justice Department motion gives no reason for the move, and, on Monday, a spokeswoman for Killian declined to comment.
Attorney Ed Yarbrough, who, along with Alex Little, represents Dr. Sen, said Monday he, too, has been left in the dark by the abrupt move. A week has passed since Brinkmann quietly filed her motion in the federal appeals court with no further filings from the Justice Department in explanation.
The Sens own the East Tennessee Cancer & Blood Center, which has offices in Greeneville and Johnson City. In 2009, they began ordering chemotherapy drugs from a supplier in Canada, which offered cheaper prices than U.S. suppliers at a time when Medicare had slashed its reimbursement rate for those drugs. In a three-year period, Sen’s wife, who managed the clinics, ordered $3 million worth of the drugs from the Canadian supplier.
The Sens’ defense team contended the Canadian supplier assured its customers the drugs were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and had no idea — until a FDA investigator showed up on their doorstep in 2013 — many of the drugs were not FDA approved, were improperly labeled and came from “foreign sources.” None of the drugs ordered by the Sens have been proven to have been unsafe for their patients, however.
The indictment against the couple accused them not only of knowing the labeling of the drugs violated the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act but plotting to procure them so they could rip off Medicare by getting the drugs cheap but billing the government insurer at its going rate. The indictment included several felony charges, especially in the case of Patricia Sen as she was the one responsible for ordering the drugs and billing Medicare.
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