Do you recall the October 2019 case of the Arkansas physician facing federal charges regarding the over-prescribing of opioids and other controlled substances?
Well, last month a grand jury in a second superseding indictment listed five counts against Dr. Lonnie Joseph Parker of Texarkana.
He was facing nine counts. There was no public filing noting why the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of Arkansas wasn’t pursuing the other four counts. And a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office said in an email to Whispers that an attorney with the information wasn’t available, but most likely there wouldn’t be a comment until after the case is over.
The second superseding indictment keeps the allegation that Parker on Aug. 1, 2018, “without a legitimate medical purpose” distributed oxycodone to a patient “thereby causing the death” of a person identified in the filing as “N.C.”
Parker also is facing four other counts of prescribing without a legitimate medical purpose, according to the indictment in U.S. District Court in Texarkana.
“Dr. Parker contends that all of his prescriptions have been written for legitimate medical purposes and within the usual course of his professional practice,” according to a filing in January by Parker’s attorneys, Jeffrey M. Rosenzweig of Little Rock and P. Drake Mann of Gill Elrod Ragon Owen of Little Rock.
Parker told Whispers in August 2020 that “I have done nothing but provide quality medical care to my patients. This patient died in custody due to law-enforcement neglect. Any objective evaluation of the evidence will prove this,” he said.
The trial has been set for Oct. 17 in federal court in Texarkana in front of Chief U.S. District Judge Susan Hickey.
You may remember that Parker was involved in the criminal justice system more than two decades ago. In 2000, a U.S. District Court jury in Little Rock found Parker guilty on one count of possession of child pornography, resulting in a 57-month sentence in federal prison. Parker has insisted that the images he received by email were unsolicited and that he was working undercover with federal agents to catch the senders of the illegal pictures.
After his release from prison, Parker applied to the Arkansas State Medical Board for the reinstatement of his medical license in 2005, which was granted.
But Parker hasn’t been allowed to practice medicine while awaiting trial.
Sign up for Daily E-news
