TAP Jury: "Not Enough Proof"

Jurors who recently acquitted eight TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc. sales managers said federal prosecutors fell short of proving a gifts-for-prescriptions conspiracy but did reveal sales practices and doctor behavior that seemed unethical to many of them. "We thought something stinks, or something is wrong, but there was not enough proof," said Alan Purdy, a letter carrier from the Boston suburb of Avon. "We thought there was something going on." But the U.S. attorney's office in Boston failed to prove the current and former sales managers at Lake Forest-based TAP worked in unison to provide kickbacks and bribes to doctors, according to three jurors who discussed their deliberations with the Tribune. Jurors said that two key government witnesses did not seem credible and that a lot of the evidence about gifts and perks provided to doctors was anecdotal and, at times, not tied to defendants on trial but to other people or urologists that did business with TAP. In addition, jurors sided with defense attorneys who said the case lacked conspiracy because most of those on trial didn't know one another.