Published: Saturday October 31, 2009 MYT 8:07:00 AM
Judge orders trial in Anna Nicole Smith drug case
LOS ANGELES (AP) - A judge ordered Anna Nicole Smith's boyfriend and two doctors to stand trial on charges of illegally funneling prescription drugs to the former Playboy model.
The ruling Friday followed a three-week preliminary hearing to determine if there was enough evidence to try lawyer Howard K. Stern, Dr. Sandeep Kapoor and Dr. Khristine Eroshevich. The charges included providing drugs to an addict.
All three pleaded not guilty.
"I think you've proven (Smith is) an addict," Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry told prosecutors before making his ruling and setting arraignments for Dec. 11. Defense attorneys contended their clients did not know Smith was an addict and were trying to help her.
"Criminalizing a doctor's efforts to help a difficult patient is problematic," Kapoor's attorney, Ellyn Garofalo, told the judge in court. "A doctor's even poor judgment is not criminal. Good faith is involved." The hearing delved deeply into Smith's troubled life and the role the defendants allegedly had in feeding her drug addiction before she died of an accidental overdose in 2007.
Larry Birkhead, the father of Smith's young daughter, said he never saw anyone take as many medications as Smith.
Prosecutors also tried to show the doctors blurred the line between being physicians and friends to the celebrity model. Kapoor once rode with Smith in a gay pride parade and worried in a diary excerpt read in court that she might ruin him because he had kissed her.
Attorney Adam Braun, who represents Eroshevich, said his client was Smith's friend first and then her psychiatrist. "The weight of testimony is that my client cared deeply for Anna Nicole Smith," Braun told the judge in court. "She was well intentioned."
Stern's attorney, Steve Sadow, said the drug charges should not apply to his client. "Mr. Stern is just a layperson," Sadow said. "He is not a doctor, and he is being charged with doctor-related activities." The judge said at one point in the hearing that he was convinced all three defendants cared deeply for Smith and tried to help her.
The defense lawyers also objected to charges involving the use of pseudonyms on Smith's prescriptions. They said the practice was common and noted that Smith had even been checked into a hospital under an assumed name.
The hearing included testimony from a bodyguard who provided a searing description of Smith's final days and his futile effort to revive her when she stopped breathing.
There also was testimony about the effects of methadone and a heavy duty painkiller called Dilaudid also known as "hospital heroin." An expert witness said there was no legitimate medical reason for Kapoor and Eroshevich to give Smith the amount of sedatives and painkillers they did.
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