By the time the negotiations were complete, a Purdue-owned holding company, Purdue Frederick, would plead guilty to a single misbranding felony and the company’s executives to misdemeanor charges of misbranding the drug. In a bit of legal-language parsing, the executives would not stipulate that they’d had direct knowledge of the misbranding, only that “the court may accept these facts in support of their guilty pleas.” In other words, their only crime was that they headed up a firm wherein other people committed crimes.
