Today, a judge dismissed the felony conspiracy charges against Smith’s doctor and Howard K. Stern, saying of Stern, “a layperson [doesn’t] knows it’s illegal to write a prescription in another name.” Really? Even if that person is a lawyer?
Superior Court Judge Robert Perry allowed only one conviction—against Smith’s psychiatrist Khristine Eroshevich—to remain, but reduced it to a misdemeanor, saying that Eroshevich was “acting out of concern for Smith,” and praised her service to the community. He sentenced her to a year of probation and a $100 fine for obtaining a Vicodin prescription under a false name. How the hell is it a “service to the community” for a psychiatrist to cop pain pills for her patient with a phony name?
The prosecution claimed that false names were used by Stern and the doctors to hide excessive prescriptions from the state’s computer system that monitors drug usage, including when she was prescribed methadone, lorazepam and Xanax when she was well into her pregnancy with her daughter Dannielynn. In fact, when Smith’s body was found after she suffered an overdose, more than 600 pills, including about 450 muscle relaxants, were missing from the prescriptions that were no more than five weeks old. But Stern said that false names were used to “protect Anna Nicole’s privacy.”
Back in October, after a three-week preliminary hearing and nine-week trial, jurors only convicted Eroshevich and Stern of a few of the 11 charges brought against them, believing that they weren’t furnishing drugs for an addict, but aiding a woman with chronic pain, despite video evidence of Smith being out-of-her-mind wasted and the fact that four—Klonopin, Ativan, Serax, Valium—of the eight drugs in her toxicology report, after her death of an accidental overdose, were benzos and not painkillers. Before the verdicts where even read in October, Judge Perry hinted at the jury that if the defendants were found guilty, he would consider “possible selective prosecution issues.”
Most Convictions Tossed In Anna Nicole Case [WDSU]