Posted on 03/25/2011 7:16:56 PM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
AUBURN, NY--A 56-year-old grandmother spent a weekend in the Cayuga County Jail after a doctor made an error on a drug prescription.
Defense attorney Charles Thomas said Auburn police charged Patricia Rigdon with possessing a forged prescription on March 11, but it turned out that the prescription called for too many pills because a doctor had made a mistake.
Thomas said the felony charge was dismissed Wednesday because of that mistake.
Rigdon said a police officer approached her in Kinney Drugs in Auburn while she waited for the pharmacist to fill a prescription for her husband and accused her of giving the pharmacist a forged prescription.
Rigdon denied the accusation and told the officer to talk to her husband’s doctor to confirm the mistake. The pharmacist told the officer that the doctor had made mistakes on prescriptions in the past, Rigdon said, but that police didn’t check with the doctor.
“If the police officer who arrested me had called the doctor, he would have found it was an error on the doctor’s part,” Rigdon said. “We could have resolved it right then and there.”
Instead, Rigdon was taken to the Auburn Police Department where she was arraigned and remanded to the Cayuga County Jail without bail for the weekend.
Rigdon said she refused to sign a confession that police requested and that her experience behind bars terrified her.
Rigdon, a diabetic, also said she believed the medical treatment she received for her blood sugar was inadequate.
“When people talk about how bad jail is, it is really that bad, they are not exaggerating,” Rigdon said. “If anything, it’s worse.”
Rigdon said she was relieved when she found out the charges were going to be dismissed and said she accepted an apology from Auburn city Judge Thomas Shamon, but added she was disappointed in the officer’s treatment.
Rigdon said she intends to talk to an attorney about her experience.
“When I heard that the charges were going to be dismissed, all I could think was ’Thank you God for looking over my shoulder,’” Rigdon said. “After I got off the phone with my attorney, I cried.”
Officials with the Auburn Police Department and the Cayuga County District Attorney’s Office were not available for comment Thursday.
He must have had a quota to fill.
Half ass cops!!!
There must be an extremely low crime rate in this area if the police are getting involved in Chicken S*** stuff like this. The police involved in the whole thing ought to lose their jobs.
Union-LEO personnel now know medicine. For this malpractice, let there be justice.
There’s a key piece of information that’s missing from this story.
How did the cop know about the prescription? Did the pharmacist call? If so, why didn’t he call doctor first to check if the prescription was correct?
I suspect there’s more going on here than is being reported.
Who called the cop? Does he just hang around the drugstore checking prescriptions? Sounds to me like the druggist notified the police. I think she should make that druggists life a nightmare.
>>>Half ass cops!!!
When granny & the lawyer get done with the cop, half an arse is all he’ll have left.
Who the hell called the cops? The pharmacist who knew this doctor had a pattern of goofing up his prescriptions?
What I would like to know is what did this cop OBSERVE to justify an arrest? If a cop think someone has committed a crime, but did not observe them committing a crime, then the cop’s job is to investigate and seek an arrest warrant.
So did this cop think he OBSERVED this woman forging the prescription? If he can not established OBSERVED what he thought was the woman forging the prescription, then I would think he has a huge problem.
The cops in this country are really nothing more than jack-booted gestapo thugs carrying out the leftist agenda.
This arrest should be expunged and the PD should lay about $50k on her and pay her attorney fees. The cop should be fired immediately. If he had conducted a proper investigation, this would not have happened.
I hear these calls on the scanner all the time. Pharmacies are under great pressure from the DEA to report any suspicious prescriptions so they won’t come under scrutiny as places that dispense narcotics to addicts with fake scripts.
SUE THAT STUPID-ASS PIG.
You asked the questions I was going to ask.
Why did he approach her in the first place?
Keep this S*** up, and one day people are gonna say f*** the cops and the law. Now granny can go get feeled-up by the TSA goons on the way to visit her grandkids.
It just doesn’t add up, does it? The pharmacist had to call the police, yet the SAME pharmacist knew that the prescribing doctor made mistakes. And it is also likely that the customer was a repeat customer in that pharmacy, not a first-time buyer. So the customer most likely was on file with the store.
Common sense would dictate that the pharmacist would talk to the customer about the problem with the scrip, call the doctor to confirm or check on the error — not call the cops.
I too came within of whisker of being thrown in jail for an entire weekend due to a courthouse screw up. I had filed and received a continuance for a court date, but the clerk didn’t process it properly. The police hauled me down to the courthouse on a Friday afternoon for failing to appear and my protestations of an error on their part fell on completely deaf ears. I complained enough that they finally checked the records. Sure enough, it was THEIR fault, not mine. Did the bastards give me a ride home after this screw up? Hell no. I had to arrange my own transportation. I can really pity this poor woman for what she went through. I hope she sues the police (and maybe the pharmacy) and wins a bundle.
Let’s see, Cops,Pharmacist, Doc. Hummmm, this could get expensive.
Under the bill Chuck Schumer is pushing in Congress, she would now be forbidden from owning a firearm.
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