Doctor sentenced for selling prescriptions
Martin Roginsky in a 2010 file photo, when he was charged with 10 felony counts of criminal sale of a prescription for a controlled substance. Credit: Handout
A Cold Spring Harbor physician who was once the medical director at the Nassau County jail was sentenced to three years' probation Wednesday after pleading guilty to charges that he wrote prescriptions for addictive pain killers without performing medical exams.
Martin Roginsky, 83, pleaded guilty in February to criminal diversion of prescription medication and professional misconduct. In addition to his probation, he must pay $93,000 to the county's asset forfeiture fund and surrender his medical license.
He did not answer reporters' questions as he left court.
Jeffrey Reynolds, executive director of the Long Island Council on Alcoholism & Drug Dependence, said Roginsky's sentence did not fit his crime.
"We should be sending a message to those doctors diverting prescription meds that you'll be arrested, you'll never practice medicine again and you'll wind up behind bars," Reynolds said. "I'm not sure that this sentence fully conveys that, nor does it reflect the incredible carnage associated with the release of that many pills into the hands of addicted Long Islanders."
John Byrne, a spokesman for Nassau District Attorney Kathleen Rice, said her office had been very aggressive in prosecuting prescription drug abuse, but that there were special circumstances here.
"Each case must be handled on its own facts, and putting this sick, elderly man in jail for the last years of his life would not be in the best interest of justice or the taxpayers," Byrne said.
Roginsky was an endocrinologist at the Nassau University Medical Center for 36 years before becoming the jail's medical director in 1999. He was fired two years later, after an inmate death and state and federal reports critical of the jail's quality of care.
When Roginsky was arrested in December 2010, Rice said he had taken $261,000 for prescriptions for opiate painkillers such as OxyContin, oxycodone and Roxicodone from undercover Rockville Centre police officers at his Rockville Centre office without examining the buyers.
The street value of the drugs was $10 million to $15 million, Rice said at the time.
