People v. Harte

131 P.3d 1180, 2005 Colo. App. LEXIS 1861, 2005 WL 3071565
CourtColorado Court of Appeals
DecidedNovember 17, 2005
DocketNo. 03CA1366
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 131 P.3d 1180 (People v. Harte) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Colorado Court of Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
People v. Harte, 131 P.3d 1180, 2005 Colo. App. LEXIS 1861, 2005 WL 3071565 (Colo. Ct. App. 2005).

Opinion

CARPARELLI, J.

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 [1183]*1183known 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 hot 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 Per-coeet 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(l)(b), C.R.S.2005, on its face and as applied. We are not persuaded.

Although defendant was charged with violation of § 18 — 18—415(l)(a), C.R.S.2005, he does not challenge the constitutionality of that provision. Instead, he challenges § 18-18-^tl5(l)(b), which states:

Information communicated to a practitioner in an effort to procure a controlled substance other than for legitimate treatment purposes or unlawfully to procure the administration of any such controlled substance shall not be deemed a privileged communication.

A court should uphold a facial challenge to a statute only when the enactment is impermissibly vague in all its applications. If the statute survives a facial challenge, a litigant may succeed on a vagueness claim only by demonstrating the statute is imper-missibly vague as applied to him. People v. Frantz, 114 P.3d 34 (Colo.App.2004). A statute is unconstitutionally vague when it “either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that persons of ordinary intelligence must necessarily guess as to its meaning and differ as to its application.” People v. Frantz, supra, 114 P.3d at 36.

Statutes are presumed to comport with constitutional standards. People v. Hickman, 988 P.2d 628 (Colo.1999). A party challenging a statute’s validity bears the burden of establishing unconstitutionality beyond a reasonable doubt. People v. Oglethorpe, 87 P.3d 129 (Colo.App.2003).

A.

Defendant first contends that § 18-18-415(l)(b) does not provide fair notice of conduct that is prohibited and, consequently, that the court erred when it held that the statute is not unconstitutionally vague on its face. .We disagree.

Section 18 — 18—415(l)(b) plainly provides that information communicated to a practitioner in an effort to procure a controlled substance other than for legitimate treatment purposes or to unlawfully procure the administration of any such controlled substance is not entitled to protection as privileged communication.

[1184]*1184We perceive no vagueness. Section 18 — 18— 415(l)(b) operates as an exception to the physician-patient privilege found at § 13-90-107(l)(d), C.R.S.2005. To the extent that defendant contends that the physician-patient privilege is guaranteed by the right to due process, he provides no analysis or case law for that contention. To the extent he relies on Clark v. District Court, 668 P.2d 3 (Colo.1983), and contends that the prosecution was required to prove that he waived the privilege, we conclude that when § 18-18-415(l)(b) applies, there is no privilege and, thus, no waiver is required.

B.

We also reject defendant’s contentions that § 18 — 18—415(l)(b) is void for vagueness because (1) the statute does not specify who is responsible for determining whether information communicated to a practitioner is for legitimate treatment purposes, (2) a private practitioner is entrusted with determining whether the patient has abrogated the physician-patient privilege, (3) the statute fails to provide a mechanism whereby a neutral and detached magistrate determines whether the patient has abrogated the privilege, and (4) there are no criteria for deciding whether the privilege has been abrogated. Defendant premises these contentions on § 13 — 90—107(l)(d), which establishes the physician-patient privilege.

Article 90 of Title 13 pertains to witnesses who appear before the courts.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
131 P.3d 1180, 2005 Colo. App. LEXIS 1861, 2005 WL 3071565, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/people-v-harte-coloctapp-2005.