A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the conviction of a doctor accused of unlawfully prescribing addictive opioids in Arizona and Wyoming after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in his favor that made it harder to prosecute such cases.
The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that under last year’s Supreme Court’s decision, jurors were wrongly instructed on how to determine whether Shakeel Kahn knowingly prescribed powerful drugs in an illegal manner.
He was at the center of a Supreme Court ruling in January 2022 that raised the bar for what prosecutors must prove to secure convictions of doctors accused of fueling the U.S. opioid crisis by turning their medical practices into “pill mills.”…