FDA lawyers listed twenty-four independent counts of legal violation. And yet, in 1962, Herbert J. Miller, the assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice, chose not to prosecute the company, arguing, with tragicomical absurdity, that it had distributed the drug to “physicians of the highest professional standing” and that only “one malformed baby” had been definitively proven to be harmed. Both claims were untrue. It concluded that “criminal prosecution is neither warranted nor desirable.” The case was closed.
