Judge orders woman to prison for perjury
Tyngsborough mother obstructed grand jury
A federal judge insisted yesterday that a former pharmaceutical company employee serve a prison sentence for perjury, despite her lawyer's contention that other notable public figures, including former Massachusetts House speaker Thomas M. Finneran and a onetime key aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, avoided prison after committing similar offenses.
US District Judge George A. O'Toole Jr. said it would foster cynicism in the judicial system and encourage more perjury if he allowed Joanne Richardson, 42, of Tyngsborough to avoid a prison sentence for lying to a grand jury investigating alleged fraud by TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc.
O'Toole, who took on the case after another judge tossed out Richardson's original sentence, ordered her to serve five months in prison, followed by five months of house arrest. He also ordered her to pay a $3,000 fine, as in her original sentence, which included six months in prison, followed by four months of house arrest.
Though she will serve one fewer month in prison after her sentence starts Jan. 9, Richardson expressed bitterness in the lobby of the federal courthouse in Boston. She said her two school-age children have suffered during her ordeal and that her father, whom she cares for, is dying of lung cancer.
"The sentence [O'Toole] just gave me, he didn't give to me," she said. "He gave it to my two kids and my dying father."
A federal prosecutor, Susan G. Winkler, maintained that lying to a grand jury has an insidious effect on the judicial system and said in court papers that O'Toole's family hardships were similar to those of other defendants.
O'Toole, a former account manager for TAP, was convicted in January 2004 of one count of perjury for having lied three years earlier to a federal grand jury.
The grand jury had been investigating allegations that TAP offered kickbacks, often in the form of education and research grants, to doctors and hospitals to get them to prescribe the company's prostate cancer-fighting drug Lupron and the antacid Prevacid.
She was convicted a year after TAP paid a record $885 million federal fine to settle similar charges.
But in March, District Court Judge William G. Young threw out Richardson's sentence, which had yet to begin, ruling that her previous lawyer had made errors in her appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in January 2005. Young said Richardson's lawyer should have sought a reduced sentence because the Supreme Court had struck down part of the 18-year-old federal sentencing guidelines nine days after the attorney's arguments in the appeals court.
In the meantime, Richardson's lawyers raised an unusual argument. They said that Richardson should be treated similarly to other high-profile defendants convicted of similar crimes, including I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, and Finneran.
In January, Finneran pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice charges in exchange for federal prosecutors' dropping perjury charges in connection with false statements he made under oath in federal court about a House redistricting plan. The plea bargain allowed him to avoid jail time.
In July, President Bush spared Libby the 30-month prison term he received after being convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to FBI agents and a grand jury probing who leaked the name of a CIA operative.
Richardson's lawyer, Max D. Stern, said he thought the Libby analogy was particularly apt, because Bush's photograph hangs in several locations in the courthouse
"If [Bush] says that a man who committed a far greater offense doesn't have to go to jail, why does this woman with two young children have to go to jail?" Stern said.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.
Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in Wednesday's City and Region section about a former pharmaceutical company employee convicted of perjury in 2004 mistakenly used the surname of the federal judge in the case when referring to the defendant on a reference concerning her background. The former account manager for TAP Pharmaceutical Products who was convicted of lying to a federal grand jury is Joanne Richardson, 42, of Tyngsborough. 