ALBANY – A Catskill physician was sentenced in Albany federal court on Friday to four years and four months in prison for unlawfully distributing opioids, for impersonating her patients and defrauding insurance companies as part of the opioids distribution scheme, and for attempting to obstruct the investigation into her criminal activities.
As part of her August 5, 2019 guilty plea, Dr. Myra Mabry, 50, an obstetrician-gynecologist, admitted that between 2015 and 2017, she wrote prescriptions for oxycodone, morphine and hydromorphone to third parties, for no legitimate medical purpose, and then instructed a co-conspirator, Sarah Brown, to fill the prescriptions by impersonating the named recipients at pharmacies, knowing that the patients’ health care benefit programs would pay the costs.
In pleading guilty, Mabry admitted that she attempted to obstruct a federal investigation into her activities by instructing Brown to testify before a federal grand jury, falsely, that Mabry was the subject of an extortionate scheme.
Mabry was not the subject of an extortion scheme and was complicit in the scheme to distribute opioids for no medical purpose, and agreed to pay Brown for false testimony in the hope of minimizing her criminal exposure and preserving her medical license.
Mabry surrendered her medical license after pleading guilty in August 2019 and has been unable to prescribe controlled substances since October 2017.
