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People v. Harte11/17/2005
JUDGMENT AFFIRMED
Taubman and Piccone, JJ., concur
Defendant, William Henry Harte, appeals the judgment of conviction entered upon a jury verdict finding him guilty of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud and deceit and attempting to obtain a controlled substance by fraud and deceit. We affirm.
The evidence showed that defendant obtained a prescription for sixty tablets of morphine on November 3, 2001, twenty tablets of Oxycontin on November 11, and forty-five tablets of Oxycontin on November 20. He obtained each of these prescriptions from a different doctor.
On November 26, 2001, defendant went to the emergency room at St. Joseph's Hospital complaining he had back pain as the result of slipping on ice and falling about 9 o'clock that morning. Defendant told the emergency room physician, Dr. Wells, that he had taken only Advil for the pain, had been to St. Joseph's for back pain about a month earlier, and had no primary care physician.
Dr. Wells testified that she asks questions to determine whether a patient is currently being prescribed medication by another physician because she does not want to give medications that could adversely interact with anything the patient is already taking and she wants to make sure the patient is not getting too much or too little medication. Defendant did not tell Dr. Wells that he had recently filled prescriptions for narcotics from two other physicians.
Dr. Wells gave defendant an injection of Demerol and prescribed Percocet for pain relief. She testified that she would not have prescribed additional medication had she known defendant had current prescriptions for Oxycontin and morphine.
The prosecution also presented evidence that, two days later, defendant went to the emergency room at St. Anthony's Central where Dr. Tripp treated him. Again, defendant said he had back pain as the result of slipping on ice and falling. He told Dr. Tripp the fall had occurred that morning. Dr. Tripp asked defendant whether he had had previous back injuries, who had treated him, and whether he was under the care of any other doctor. Defendant told Dr. Tripp that he had been to a pain specialist two months earlier, but explained that he was no longer under the specialist's care. He also told Dr. Tripp that his last visit to an emergency room was about six months earlier and said that Advil was the only medication he was taking. Defendant did not ask Dr. Tripp for pain medication.
X-rays confirmed that defendant had a back injury. However, Dr. Tripp became suspicious because defendant said he had fallen at his apartment in Highlands Ranch and there are several emergency rooms closer to his home than St. Anthony's Central. Dr. Tripp called a local pharmacy, which informed him that it had filled five prior prescriptions for defendant for narcotics in the month of November and that the pharmacy had a "narcotic alert" on him. Dr. Tripp informed the police, who arrested defendant at the hospital.
The jury found defendant guilty of obtaining a controlled substance, Percocet, by fraud and deceit, and attempting to obtain a controlled substance by fraud and deceit. The court sentenced him to three years in community corrections for obtaining the Percocet from Dr. Wells and one year for attempting to obtain a controlled substance from Dr. Tripp by fraud and deceit. The court directed that the sentences would be served consecutively.
I.
Defendant challenges on vagueness grounds the constitutionality of § 18-18-415(1)(b), C.R.S. 2005, on its face and as applied. We are not persuaded.
Although defendant was charged with violation of § 18-1
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