Scores of people ensnared by Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg’s efforts to curb the area’s opioid epidemic won’t be able to beat criminal charges by claiming they got bad advice from their attorneys, an appeals court ruled Wednesday.
In a decision that lifts a legal cloud that threatened to ravage Aronberg’s crackdown on the county’s illicit drug treatment industry, the 4th District Court of Appeal ruled that dozens of people charged with patient brokering can’t drag their attorneys into court to testify that they advised their clients that what they were doing was legal.
“As a matter of first impression, we hold that ‘advice of counsel’ is not a defense to the general intent crime of patient brokering,” Judge Jonathan Gerber wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel.
Read more at The Palm Beach Post.
