As for Lilly's payment of $700 million to settle the lawsuit, Mr Chabasinski told the judge, "when a company is making billions of dollars from some drug, a few hundred million dollars is simply a cost of doing business."
"But if drug company executives know they may face long prison terms for their willingness to kill people for profit," he states, "they will think more than twice about what they do."
"If executives can go to prison for stealing their companies' money," he told the judge, "surely those who steal people's lives deserve at least the same fate."
Mr Chabaskinski says Lilly's biggest worry is that the documents will be reviewed by some prosecutor and that the real purpose of the injunction is to frighten people into giving up their First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances, "which in this situation," he says, "means putting these documents into the hands of as many potential prosecutors as possible."
He points out that Lilly has created a massive public health problem by convincing doctors to prescribe Zyprexa to many thousands of people, whose drug-caused disabilities will now drain the public health system for years to come. "It is not in the public interest," he told the court in the letter, "to keep documents secret when it will have the effect of making it much more difficult to prevent the disability of thousands of people."
The pursuit of Mr Gottstein by Lilly attorneys could almost be likened to being chased around the country by a group of terrorists. Lilly wants the court to charge him with criminal contempt complete with sanctions.
Their conduct is clearly an abuse of the legal system, funded by the ill-gotten profits of Zyprexa, to run up costs for Mr Gottstein, by harassing him and anyone that he may associate with. At the court hearing on January 3, 2007, Lilly attorneys asked the judge to issue an order requiring Mr Gottstein to travel to New York City for a deposition within 5 days, and:
"Requiring Mr Gottstein to immediately produce ... copies of any and all documents and information including, but not limited to, all computer(s), hard-drives, other electronic storage media, hardcopy documents, emails, e-documents, text messaging, instant messaging, phone records and voice mails, that refer or relate to Zyprexa".
And talk about chilling the freedoms of the First Amendment, Lilly wants the court to force Mr Gottstein to produce: "Communications he had with anyone relating to these documents, including but not limited to, his dissemination of or discussions relating to the documents".
Lilly also asked for the order to include individual reporters and the top experts on psychiatric drugs in the US, in demanding that Mr Gottstein's disclose his communications with "any person, organization or entity who received these documents including, but not limited to, Terrie Gottstein, Jerry Winchester, Alex Berenson, Dr. Peter Breggin, Dr. Grace Jackson, Dr. David Cohen and Bruce Whittington, Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, Laura Ziegler, Judy chamberlin, Vera Sherav, robert Whitaker, Steve Shaw, Will Hall, Singeha Prakash, or anyone associated with the Alliance for Human Research Protection or MindFreedom; and his efforts to retrieve these documents from the individuals to whom they were improperly disseminated."
Lilly is also requesting that if anything responsive to their request has been deleted or destroyed in computers, that Mr Gottstein be required to haul "any and all relevant computers" to New York City for the deposition, and permit "forensic examination and recovery of such documents."
In addition to the big bucks being made by thinking up ways to harass Mr Gottstein, Lilly attorneys at the Pepper Hamilton Law Firm are making money hand over fist by scouring the internet looking for more people to harass. On December 30, 2006, they were apparently working overtime on the Saturday of the biggest holiday weekend of the year, when they began threatening a private citizen, Eric Whalen, in emails ordering him to remove the Lilly documents from his web site stating:
"You are facilitating the violation of a Federal Court order. Please immediately remove the link to the file "ZyprexaKills.tar.gz" (or its mirror), including all cached materials, or we will take further legal action against your website."
In another email, they told Mr Whalen, "You have been on notice now for several hours that you are operating in violation of a Federal Court Order, and you have thus far, refused to assure your compliance."
"You must take the link down immediately," they wrote, "or we will take further legal action to shut down your website, and seek all available remedies."
In his own defense, Mr Whalen replied to the emails and stated: "The documents linked to on my website were downloaded from an anonymous source. As far as I know I'm not under any court order. Dissemination of the contents of the documents is clearly in the public interest. Is there a legal basis for you[r] request?"
You are doing a great job putting the REAL important stuff out there for everyone. I am so thrilled when I read your articles!!! Keep writing and don't stop. Write for those of us who have been so tortured by these drugs that we have extreme difficulty reading and writing.
by
Heather Patenaude (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments)
on Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 7:56:19 PM
