Doctor acquitted on drug charges
A jury deliberated about five hours Thursday before acquitting a McHenry County doctor on charges she traded painkiller prescriptions for cash with a pair of admitted addicts.
Dr. Thanam L. Paramanandhan, 75, of Spring Grove, could have faced up to five years in prison had jurors convicted her on four counts of unlawful delivery of a controlled substance. Instead she left the McHenry County courthouse Thursday free of criminal allegations that had been hanging over her for nearly two years.
The charges alleged Paramanandhan sold prescriptions for Vicodin and Valium for $55 to a police informant in December 2006 and January 2007. The prescriptions were issued in the name of the informant's son, a patient of hers who at the time was behind bars in the Kenosha County, Wis., jail.
She also had been charged with unlawfully providing two Vicodin prescriptions to an undercover McHenry County Sheriff's deputy brought to her Richmond office by the informant. But McHenry County Judge Sharon Prather dismissed those charges mid-trial, ruling there was not credible evidence to support the allegations.
The state suspended her medical license shortly after her arrest.
Paramanandhan took the witness stand early Thursday as the final witness in her four-day trial and denied claims she was little more than a drug pusher for some of her patients.
"I don't treat people unless I see them in person," she testified. "It's not a mail-order or phone-order business. I believed a person was abusing it, I would refuse (to write a prescription)."
County prosecutors, however, painted a very different picture of the physician. Assistant McHenry County State's Attorney Michael Combs said in closing arguments that Paramanandhan sold prescriptions without giving exams or properly tracking patient histories. Her office was in such disarray that a legitimate examination would have been impossible, Combs said.
"To suggest she is on the level in providing medical care in that environment is ludicrous," he said. "This was a place junkies could go. You go in with cash, get your (prescription) and you feed your addiction."
Paramanandhan's defense did not deny that she issued the informant prescriptions, but said there is no evidence she knew, or intended to, feed a painkiller addiction.
"They want to say her office was filthy," defense lawyer Daniel Hofmann said. "Her intent was not filthy or wrong. Her intent was to be a good professional, to exercise good judgment as a physician and to help somebody."