“It felt,” he said Sunday night on 60 Minutes, “like my
legs were being dipped into a furnace.” Richard Paey referred to
the road accident that left him, post-surgery, with screws in his
spine and a pain, vicious as it was permanent, that had swallowed
up half of his body. The good news of plentiful painkillers was
offset by the bad news: climbing tolerance meant climbing doses,
and when Paey moved with his wife Linda and his three children to
Florida, those doses became problems in and of themselves.
The story is a sad one: well-meaning father and (as they said on
the news) “Ivy-league educated lawyer” Paey turned to his New
Jersey doctor of seven years for the prescriptions he couldn’t get
in Florida, where fear of running afoul of rigid Rx-drug laws is
nearly as rampant as abuse of the drugs themselves. His rate of
consumption prompted surveillance, which lasted somewhere between
two and three months. The outcome: a sting operation, followed by
the longer and sharper sting of a 25-year sentence for which the
judge, it’s said, had no alternative.
Richard Paey’s case can be argued as well out of court as in it
— or better. At the top of the list of questions are zingers like
these: Why did he choose to stay in Florida? Why did his trusted
doctor fink out on him by testifying against his own prior
testimony (he claimed, per 60 Minutes, that “all of the
prescriptions were forged”)? And what sort of legal system is ours
that allows a State to bring trial “convinced that Paey
might have been reselling the drugs?” But a different
class of questions can be asked, too. When justice is so pro forma
as to impose outcomes no reasonable person would prefer, victims
seeking to undo their status must seek to replace it with
celebrity. Trial by peers is agglutinated, to the tune of tens
of millions of peers. The court is the court of public
opinion, and the proceedings are mediated. “We,” the people, must
judge Paey not behind the blindfold of justice but through the
filter of militating or mitigating publicity.
So I went to Linda Paey, on Richard’s request, to mediate the
media.
LINDA PAEY IS AFRAID. Like Richard, her concern is the distortion
— of excessive distance and excessive closeness — provided by the
refracted version of actual life. ” He told me last night,” she
wrote on the 24th of this month, “that he wants me to tell people
before it airs” that his fear was a familiar one — “simplifying
the story to meet the show format.” The details that matter most to
Richard are, Linda explained, “how the state obtained his
conviction” — what they are convinced involved the perjury of his
New Jersey doctor and a single-bottle standard in Florida for
violating the trafficking statute.
There is no shortage of media outlets for Richard and Linda. The
story has been compelling enough to attract a fair coverage
pattern: The St. Petersburg Times and Tampa
Tribute have been joined, over the past two years, by
Reason magazine, Nightline, the New York
Times (that is, John Tierney), and National Review Online.
The Cato Institute did a Policy Report. The coverage has been
promising enough — Radley Balko’s NRO piece is illustrative.
“Governor Bush should free Richard Paey. And Florida lawmakers
should pass reforms to ensure that drug-war fanaticism no longer
prevents sick people from getting the medication they need.” But
the blessing of media coverage is its curse, too: the greater the
snowball is, the less an ability to push it one way or another the
person inside can muster.
This is particularly true when the person is wheelchair-bound
and quite seemingly punished by Florida corrections for engaging
Tierney and others. On the 19th Linda wrote that Richard’s
worsening infections — causing sores “on all of his limbs” — were
threatening the morphine pump connected to his spine. Under such
circumstances he was unavailable for comment. But Linda conveyed
Richard’s frustration with the coverage he received on
Nightline. Richard, it must be noted, refused to plea
bargain, which would have exempted him from jail time. His
rationale — on 60 Minutes — was dual: it would have been
impossible to get medicated as a plea-bargained felon; it would
have been impossible to “regain that dignity I had lost.”
Regardless, Richard was “upset that [Nightline] made it
seem like he had regrets for not taking the deal. Richard said he
made clear that he did everything he could do to avoid jail and
that he was most hurt by how our family has suffered from his
imprisonment and wishes he was home with us.”
NONE OF WHICH IS to say, of course, that negotiating the forced
plays and concentrated stakes of prime-time celebrity leaves
Richard and Linda bitter. Linda “felt Nightline did a lot
for the issues Rich’s case presented and in general it was a good
show. We want the publicity to help stop the manner in which
chronic pain patients are treated in this country,” she insisted.
For those with enduring interest, Linda pointed to an Austrian film
documentary outfit, called Cronos, which is covering Richard in
what she considers fine style. “Cronos has dedicated many hours and
resources to obtaining a complete picture of what has happened to
us. They are professional in their filming but most importantly
they care about their responsibility to our story […]. I trust
them in telling any aspect of our story they so chose to tell.”
Until then, we have a multiplying, refracting field of Richard
Paeys to contend with. The legal root of Richard’s problem
is an offshoot of Congress’ mandatory minimum sentencing
guidelines, designed to keep judges from going wobbly on drug
denizens. The possibility, offered up hopefully by Richard’s
sympathizers, of treating his situation as “a medical [not legal]
issue” is plenty humane, but fair only to the extent that it exists
within the context of a law-network we have built quite literally
by the book. The way to fix bad sentencing guidelines is not to
disregard the law simply because it offends. (This is where
penumbras and emanations come from.)
Unfortunately the goal of helping chronic pain patients does not
precisely overlap, or even parallel, that of helping Richard Paey.
The old resort to sovereign mercy — in this case, the good heart
of Jeb Bush — may be an excellent, even a necessary, way to bring
Richard’s punishment more in line with his crime. But his
publicity, as publicity, heightens his exceptionalism. It is nearly
impossible to escape exclusivity when crossing into celebrity. Put
another way: the longer spent on the red carpet, the harder to be
an advocate for your type.
THE GOOD NEWS for chronic pain patients is that Richard — for all
his amiability on national television — is not in glamour mode,
nor will he be any time soon. Certainly, a bit of pride shows
through: the garments supplied by the state, in that regard, are
threadbare. But the possibility that his awkward, intractable
situation might translate into broader reform is real. The
publicity surrounding Richard may yet be more a web than a net. His
circumstance is maybe the least susceptible to conversion by
publicity into a one-man show. And this is, indeed, as it should be
— because the right way to change the mechanism that imprisons
Richard’s type of offender in the way that it has is by the same
channels that it was created. Commuting sentences is a quick fix,
but always a partial one, and throwing out Law itself with the
bathwater of a few unhappy laws is neither fix nor partial.
If the media can facilitate clarity here, instead of distortion,
Richard Paey will find himself in that rarest of Twilight
Zone episodes: that with a happy ending.
James G. Poulos is a writer and attorney living in
Washington, D.C. His commentaries are found at Postmodern
Conservative.
