Owners of closed Madison pain clinic sentenced
The owners of shuttered pain clinics in Madison and Decatur were sentenced to 20 years in prison Monday for unlawfully distributing opioids and defrauding insurers, according to Prim Escalona, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.
Mark Murphy, 66, and his wife, Jennifer Murphy, 66, both of Lewisburg, Tennessee, owned and operated North Alabama Pain Services, which closed its Decatur and Madison offices in early 2017. They were sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Scott Coogler after being convicted of conspiracy to unlawfully distribute controlled substances, conspiracy to commit health care fraud, conspiring to defraud the United States and receiving kickbacks.
Mark Murphy was the only doctor at the two locations. Escalona said in a statement that”some patients went months or years without seeing him during their monthly office visits, even though they continued to get opioid prescriptions that he had pre-signed.”
In the five years before the clinics closed, Escalona said, Mark Murphy wrote prescriptions for more than 10 million opioid pills.
Mark Murphy and Jennifer Murphy were each ordered to pay more than $50 million in restitution.
Also on Monday, Christie Rollins, 52, of Petersburg, Tennessee, was sentenced to 24 months in prison for selling medically unnecessary durable medical equipment and expensive topical creams at the pain clinics, Escalona said. Rollins agreed to pay restitution of more than $564,000.
