After two and a half hours of deliberation Friday, jurors acquitted Dr. Lawrence Francis Chenier of conspiracy but failed to reach a verdict on 73 counts of prescription forgery.
Chenier, who lives in Vicksburg but practices medicine in Tallulah, said he was grateful to jurors for the not guilty verdict on the conspiracy charge.
“It’s been a traumatic ordeal over the past three years,” he said.
Facing the possibility of re-trial, Chenier’s attorneys Lisa Ross and Marshall Sanders advised him to speak briefly with the media, though both issued a statement for him.
“We believe the jury reached the right verdict. We’ve believed from day one that he was not guilty,” Ross said.
Sanders said he hoped the forgeries would not be taken to trial again.
“We think that the jury was fair and a good man was exonerated, and we hope this ordeal is over for him,” Sanders said.
The jury was made up of six black women, three white men and two white women.
Seven jurors voted to convict Chenier of the 73 counts of prescription forgery, and five jurors voted not guilty, a juror reached after the trial ended said. The juror asked not to be identified.
The not guilty verdict on the conspiracy charge came easily, the juror said.
“We felt that in all probability that he didn’t realize what he was doing,” the juror said. “If he knew he was actually passing pills to Pattie (Carr) to that degree, he would have stopped it.”
Throughout trial, defense attorneys alleged that Carr, Chenier’s live-in girlfriend, stole his prescription pad and forged the prescriptions herself. Carr denied the allegations but the defense pointed to a series of lies pulled off by her in order to obtain hydrocodone.
Jurors who voted not guilty seemed somewhat hung up on the fact that no handwriting expert validated the 73 prescriptions as having been written by Chenier, the juror said.
“If there would have been an expert, I feel it would have been different,” the juror said.
Sanders touched on the lack of a handwriting expert throughout the trial.
“It’s not enough that someone brings me a prescription pad with Dr. Chenier’s name on it. You have to prove to me that he wrote it,” Sanders said during closing arguments.
District Attorney Ricky Smith said he would examine this coming week the possibility of taking Chenier back to trial on the forgery counts.
During closing arguments Assistant District Attorney Lane Campbell said it would have been impossible for Chenier not to notice the 300 pill bottles found in his home when narcotics agents raided it in September 2011 or that Carr was using upwards of 90 hydrocodone tablets per day.
“The thing about doctors is they notice things in other people. That ability doesn’t just fall off when they leave the office,” Campbell said.
Carr pleaded guilty in September to five counts of prescription forgery but is yet to be sentenced by Circuit Judge M. James Chaney. She testified this week that she is still living with Chenier.