Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney John Niedermann wrote in court papers that the murder charges against Tseng stemmed from her ignoring warnings from the coroner's office that her patients were dying from her prescriptions.
Tseng was charged in the deaths of Joey Rovero, 21, Steven Ogle, 25, and Vu Nguyen, 28. According to the Los Angeles Times, at least eight of Tseng's patients had died from overdoses in 2008. Among her patients were three convicted drug dealers, two of whom admitted to selling drugs that Tseng prescribed.
The prosecution claims that Tseng received over a dozen phone calls from either law enforcement or the coroner's office, telling her "Your patient has died." Tseng's husband, Gene Tu, testified for the defense that she treated the calls as "just FYI," according to CNN.
Tseng's clinic was allegedly notorious for how easy it was to receive prescriptions. Over the course of three years, Tseng would write over 27,000 prescriptions - 25 a day, according to CBS. Her practice was a busy one, so busy that her appointments allegedly would last just three minutes.
Her husband, Gene Tu, was also a doctor. The prosecution claims that Gene Tu had openly referred to his wife's patients as "druggies." Tseng's patients were young people who would travel to pay her in cash for her visits, CNN reports. The three young men whose deaths she was charged with all allegedly drove long distances. Rovero reportedly drove over 300 miles from Tempe, Arizona to obtain prescriptions from Tseng.
According to the LA Times, Tseng's tax returns show that between 2007 and 2010, she and her husband made $5 million.
Despite the prosecution telling the jury that a grandmother of one of Tseng's patients called Tseng and demanded that she stop giving pills to her grandson, Tseng's defense hinged on her being taken advantage of by addicted patients who "got in over her head," as her attorney told jurors. According to a letter read by her attorney, Tracy Green, Tseng claimed to lack sufficient training in prescribing narcotics and that she felt "shameful and remorseful" for her conduct.
Doctor faces sentencing for murder in landmark L.A. case tied to patients' overdose deaths https://t.co/E5OGJc390t
— Zoe Norton (@zoe_nor) February 5, 2016
With Tseng being the first doctor to be convicted of murder for her patients overdose, some wonder what this will mean for the medical community going forward. The LA Times reports that some are concerned about whether Tseng's conviction will change how narcotic prescriptions are handled.
Isaiah Brooks, BSN, RN-BC, MSN, told RT that there could stand to be some change in prescribing highly addictive substances. As a nurse in both a public Brooklyn hospital and a private Manhattan one, he has experienced a range of patients and how they are handled.
"There's a difference between the psych emergency room in the heart of Brooklyn versus a private hospital in Manhattan where they are a lot more lenient with potentially addictive substances," he said.
"The doctors in Brooklyn are more likely to give you hydroxyzine [a sedative and anti-histamine also used for hives] for anxiety and Tylenol for pain," he explained but added, "I think it's a practical thing because of the patient population. It is a revolving door (same patients coming back) so there's more potential for abuse."
He also said, "What I'm saying is the poor black people in Brooklyn get a lot more scrutiny than the rich white ones in Manhattan."
But in terms of whether or not the ruling will affect doctors' ability to care for their patients, he explained that, "It's the responsibility of the physician to take care of the patient. In school you're taught that pain is subjective and that it should be addressed depending on the patient's subjective view of it."
The dependency on subjectivity could be a part of the problem.
"Of course the doctor needs to see the signs," Brooks said of the doctor's responsibility to handle potential medication abuse, "but it's the people that write the theories that we base our practice on that also need to reevaluate them and create some system changes."
Human life throughout the centuries has always been cheap. In the old days people were useful to the rulers to get the job done. But today and at the rate at which we multiply, in a world that is getting all the more complex everyday (I should write a report about all the trouble banks are giving me in my every-day transactions) human life is getting cheaper by the day. So basically you are useless to the system, you are just another cash machine for the rulers. Young people, that are usually more emotional than the elderly, can see this, feel it, sense it and realize that the best thing that most probably will happen to them is die in a senseless war of any "type".
So they choose to "leave". Be it by gun, be it by drugs (in a "sweet dream", 3-4 milligrams of heroin
is an overdose even for an addict) they reject a world that keeps slamming doors at their faces, so they logically wonder "Why" ? What's the point ? Well, there is no point. The point is to survive till your last day,
whenever that maybe.
I 've had a high school friend. A few years after graduation I learned that he killed himself. When I was serving in the army we played with real guns, grenades and mortar fire and nobody ever got a scratch. Later on at work 9 (!!!) people died over a lousy paycheck, people I spoke to and breathed the same air every day. Another 2 in my administration team were hit by cancer at a relatively early age and left with disability pensions.
So at the age of 16 you get a license to drive, at 21 you can drink alcohol, why shouldn't it be legal from some age onwards to die if you want to ?
If you make a cost-benefit analysis to life when you die, you will most definitely find that the cost is higher than the benefit. So there goes another sucker who made the world junta more rich and powerful so as to step on the next generations even more forcefully. I made your day eh ?