Following eight years of litigation, an Orange County Superior Court judge threw out a major insurance fraud case. According to the report in the Orange County Register, all charges of involuntary manslaughter and felony insurance fraud-related counts were dismissed against Kareem Ahmed, Andrew Robert Jarminski and Michael Rudolph, according to court records.
Back in 2014, an Orange County Grand Jury initially indicted 15 people – including 10 doctors and a pharmacist – for their alleged involvement in a multi-million dollar workers compensation fraud scheme. The alleged ringleader was Kareem Ahmed, president and CEO of Landmark Medical Management, an Ontario California company.
Ahmed allegedly paid physicians a total of more than $25 million to dispense the compound creams between June 15, 2010, and Dec. 31, 2012. The amounts individual doctors received between 2010 and 2013 ranged from $600,000 to more than $2.5 million, it alleged. Among those Ahmed allegedly paid were Daniel Capen, M.D. (more than $2.5 million); Andrew Jarminski, M.D. (more than $1.9 million); pharmacist Michael Rudolph (more than $1 million); and Rahil Kahn, M.D. (more than $1 million), according to the indictment.
Challenges to the procedures used in the indictment eventually were elevated to the Court of Appeal in the case of Kareem Ahmed v Superior Court, which agreed with some the challenges made by the defendants, and thus reversed the trial court, and remanded the case.
Instead of returning to the Grand Jury, the Orange County District Attorney then re-filed a felony complaint against Kareem Ahmed, Andrew Jarminski, Michael Rudolph and Norma Garner instead.
The case had another setback in 2019, when Orange County Superior Court Judge Sheila Hanson ruled that prosecutors violated the defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights to counsel and Fifth Amendment rights to due process, invaded the attorney-client privilege, and ordered that prosecutors purge all privileged materials from their computer servers and that on the servers at the Orange County Regional Forensics Lab. And that going forward, she would exclude all evidence that was privileged or derived from privileged evidence.
This ruling obviously made it difficult for prosecutors to go forward with the case. Since that ruling, the attorneys have been working through what evidence was not tainted and could still be used in the case. There apparently was not enough evidence left. All charges of involuntary manslaughter and felony insurance fraud-related counts were dismissed this month against Kareem Ahmed, Andrew Robert Jarminski and Michael Rudolph, according to court records.