A Manhattan judge has sentenced a doctor to the maximum prison penalty after a jury found the 59-year-old guilty of denying his wife necessary medical care, instead choosing to pump her with a deadly dose of supplements make to treat an ailment she never had.
Dr. Jeffrey Harris will spend five-to-15 years in prison following a sentencing on Friday in the death of his late wife, Tammy Harris, who died in Manhattan in 2018.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said a New York State Supreme Court jury found Harris guilty of second-degree manslaughter "for killing her by giving her numerous supplements and alternative treatments, including poisonous levels of selenium, and preventing her from seeking treatment for lupus."
According to prosecutors, his wife started experience aches and pains back in 2016 while the couple lived in Washington State. Doctors determined that Tammy had the autoimmune disease, but her husband intervened and instead, prosecutors argued in court, took her care into his own hands.
The couple, according to prosecutors, met in 2003 when Dr. Harris was Tammy's doctor. They married four years later in 2007.
Tammy's health worsened the year after her diagnosis while under the care of her husband and a rotation of medications not adequately treating her lupus. By the summer of 2017, she was bedridden after losing a ton of weight and becoming "severely jaundiced."
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"[Harris] moved from one diagnosis to the next, finally falsifying mercury poisoning and giving her such high doses of selenium that he eventually killed her with his reckless treatment," Bragg said in a statement.
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Despite a couple of hospital admissions to improve her condition, Dr. Harris continued to return her home where administered supplements "without her doctor's knowledge." It was around this time that Harris began giving Tammy selenium to treat mercury poisoning. She did not have mercury poisoning.
In January 2018, Tammy, only weighing 80 pounds, was flown to Manhattan where Dr. Harris wanted her to be treated at an alternative medical center. They tested Tammy, who was not suffering from mercury poisoning and had an "enormous amount of selenium in her blood -- more than 10 times the reference range."
The next month, Tammy's heart failed while staying at the Palace Hotel. She was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital, where she died.
“Jeffrey Harris betrayed his duty as a physician and as a husband by ignoring all medical evidence and advice and experimenting on his wife, leading to her slow and painful death,” Bragg said.
