PHILADELPHIA, December 16, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Kermit Gosnell has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for illegally dispensing prescription drugs, bringing an end to the most-watched legal saga related to an abortionist.
U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe imposed the sentence in addition to the three consecutive life sentences Gosnell is already serving for murdering at least three newborns at his “house of horrors” abortion facility.
Reporter Sean G. O'Sullivan, who attended today's sentencing for The News Journal in Delaware, tweeted the sentence late this afternoon.
In July, Gosnell entered a guilty plea to running a prescription drug operation. Patients at his daytime “pain management center” paid him $20 for each prescription of highly addictive substances such as OxyContin, Percocet or Xanax. They tipped his employees an extra $10 or $20 for the prescriptions.
Gosnell admitted writing as many as 2,300 prescriptions a month – once writing 200 in one single night. According to prosecutors, the abortionist made at least $200,000 peddling prescriptions between June 2008 and February 2010.
He defended his actions on the grounds that selling illegal drugs helped lift his inner city clientele out of poverty.
“These are hard economic times,” he told Philadelphia Magazine writer Steve Volk. “These people need these pills.”
“He believes he was a soldier at war with poverty,” Volk wrote.
Between abortion and his side prescription pill income, Gosnell earned an estimated $1.8 million a year.
It was allegations that the now 72-year-old abortionist ran a “pill mill” that brought federal agents to Gosnell's Women's Medical Society in February 2010.
Law enforcement agents who raided his office found the aborted remains of 47 children packed away in boxes, jugs, and even a lime-ade container. Prosecutors said Gosnell kept the feet of babies as a kind of trophy.
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Police also found cat urine and the blood of his patients – and victims – staining operating tables and recliners in the “recovery room,” where unsterilized equipment spread STDs between his patients.
His workers testified that Gosnell routinely allowed babies to be born alive and then “aborted” by a process he called “snipping” – using scissors to sever the spinal columns of babies through the backs of their necks.
A mostly “pro-choice” jury convicted Gosnell of murder and infanticide in May. Gosnell maintains he is in jail due to Catholic pro-life bias.