A Texas husband and wife whose testimony at an August jury trial shed light on behind-the-scenes operations of a west Little Rock medical clinic dubbed a "pill mill" were rewarded Wednesday with probationary sentences.
At the request of federal prosecutors, U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr. agreed to halve the penalty range that both Randy Chane and his wife, Densheo Lorraine Davis, faced as a result of their guilty pleas before the trial began. Moody then granted defense attorneys' requests to "depart downward" from the reduced penalty ranges of less than two years, to allow both Chane and Davis to escape prison time altogether by each serving five years' probation.
Chane was the co-manager of the KJ Medical Clinic on Hermitage Road that was shut down in a May 2015 raid led by Drug Enforcement Administration agents. Davis was a nursing assistant at the clinic, which opened in mid-November 2014 at 11215 Hermitage Road, the same location that its predecessor, the Artex Medical Clinic, had closed on Oct. 6, 2014.
Prosecutors said both clinics were "pill mills" that appeared on the outside to be legitimate medical clinics but whose real purpose was to generate prescriptions for the pain and anxiety medications hydrocodone and Xanax, respectively, for illegal resale on the street at greatly inflated prices of up to $30 a pill.
An August jury trial resulted in the conviction of a nurse practitioner, Kristen Raines, who worked at both clinics, and the acquittals of a doctor, Felicie Wyatt, who reviewed prescription records at Artex on a part-time basis, and physician's assistant Aaron Paul Borengasser, who wrote prescriptions at Artex for about three weeks. All were accused, among other charges, of conspiring to illegally distribute the controlled substances, but all said they didn't know, at least initially, that the clinic was a "pill mill." Jurors didn't believe Raines, who worked at both clinics for a longer period of time. She is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 23.
Chane testified that his brother, John Christopher Ware, who co-owned both clinics, persuaded him to give up a good job at a liquor distributorship in Houston to move to Little Rock and manage the clinic. Ware is awaiting trial in the Northern District of Texas, where he is accused of operating similar clinics in the Dallas area with Stanley James Jr., who is awaiting sentencing on his guilty plea to conspiracy last March.
Chane told jurors that patients often arrived at the KJ clinic together in a van driven by a clinic "regular," sometimes arriving in the parking lot as early as 6 a.m., an hour before it opened. He said that each day, the clinic saw 30 to 60 patients and generated $8,000 to $10,000 cash. Chane also told jurors that Raines, who reported making only $13,000 altogether from both clinics, in the form of checks, was paid $2,000 a week in cash.
Davis testified that many of the patients appeared to be poor or homeless -- the type of people that investigators said recruiters paid to pose as patients.
On Jan. 3, Moody sentenced Anthony Markeith King of Texas, who was a recruiter at Artex and a co-owner of the KJ clinic, to 10 years in prison for his guilty plea to the conspiracy charge.
Christopher Manson, who co-managed Artex and KJ, is serving two years in prison. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy before the trial, and testified that he kept working at the clinic after realizing it wasn't legitimate because he had moved his family to Little Rock for the job and had no money to relocate.
Metro on 01/29/2017