SCRANTON, Pa. — A Pike County doctor will spend two decades behind bars for unlawfully prescribing pain medication, including to a woman who died from an overdose, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced.
Martin Evers, 66, was sentenced Thursday by U.S. District Court Judge Robert D. Mariani to 22 years in prison. Mariani recommended to the Federal Bureau of Prisons that Evers be placed at a medium security facility in Otisville, New York.
The sentence is not far off the 20-year mandatory minimum that he faced, which his attorneys called a "likely death sentence."
The penalty comes more than a year after a federal jury in Scranton found him guilty on 71 counts of unlawful distribution of controlled substances. That included fentanyl, oxycodone and methadone. His medical license was suspended in 2019, state records show.
Friends, family and patients wrote letters to Mariani on Evers' behalf and explained he was he dedicated and loyal physician. "He strived to do what was just and fair through a deep sense of right and wrong," wrote one.
Federal authorities painted a different picture. Evers' prescribing caused addiction and death, prosecutors said.
"The investigation exposed a 'doctor' who, in the face of overwhelming evidence that several of his patients had become addicts, chose to feed those addictions with his prescription pad," Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Olshefski wrote in legal filings.
In one case, a 48-year-old patient from Monroe County, Michelle Clancy, died of a drug overdose in February 2019. Her death was "predictable," prosecutors said.
Clancy suffered from several life threatening conditions and displayed drug seeking behavior, prosecutors said. He prescribed her fentanyl and oxycodone.
"He did all of this to a woman he knew was an addict and literally could not breathe at times," Olshefski wrote. "The only 'medical care' the defendant provided to Michelle Clancy was opioids, opioids, and more opioids."
Evers, the son of a Holocaust survivor, became a doctor in 1985 and practiced in Milford as part of the Bon Secours Charity Health System.
His defense argued he had never been the subject of discipline from regulatory agencies or the state Board of Medicine.
"Dr. Evers has lost his license to practice medicine, is losing his home, and much of his financial resources. He is now posed with a likely death sentence merely by the imposition of the mandatory minimum," wrote his attorney, Patrick Casey. "The destruction of Dr. Evers’ life is an overwhelming testament to the Government’s use of force."
During a three-week trial in November and December 2022, jurors heard from six pharmacists who refused to fill prescriptions issued by Evers and from a Walmart official who said the chain had a nationwide ban on filling narcotics prescriptions he wrote.
Evers must also pay a $50,000 fine. He will be supervised for three years by a probation officer following his release from prison.
"The medical profession the defendant wanted the jury to believe exists can never be accepted as the practice of medicine," Olshefski wrote. "This case was never about bad medicine. It was always about no medicine in the prescribing of highly potent and highly addictive controlled substances. This case was never about poor documentation. One must have engaged in doing something in order to have something to document."
