[jeffkrol]

I do understand this.. a teeny bit......
IOWA CITY, Iowa: Drug charges dropped because of too much evidence - Florida Wires - MiamiHerald.com

A fugitive doctor charged in the nation's largest prosecution of Internet pharmacies is getting off in part because there's just too much evidence in his case: more than 400,000 documents and two terabytes of electronic data that federal authorities say is expensive to maintain.
The case started in 2003 with a raid of a small Iowa drugstore and eventually secured the conviction of 26 defendants, including 19 doctors. The investigation dismantled two Internet pharmacies that illegally sold 30 million pills to customers. Investigators also recovered $7 million, most of which went to Iowa police agencies that helped with the case.
When a major drug suspect flees the country, federal authorities often leave the charges pending in case the fugitive tries to sneak back into the U.S. or a country with a friendly extradition process. But in Angulo's case, the volume of evidence posed a bigger burden.
The evidence took up 5 percent of the DEA's worldwide electronic storage. Agents had also kept several hundred boxes of paper containing 440,000 documents, plus dozens of computers, servers and other bulky items.
Two terabytes is enough to store the text of 2 million novels, or roughly 625,000 copies of "War and Peace."
Two-terabyte memory drives are widely available for $100, but the DEA's data server must be relatively small and may need replacement, a costly and risky proposition for an agency that must maintain the integrity of documents, said University of Iowa computer scientist Douglas Jones.
"A responsible organization doesn't upgrade every time new technology is available. That's all they would be doing," Jones said. "But the result is you end up in situations like this where the capacity they have is not quite up to the incredible volume of data involved."
Randy Stock, who runs the website whatsabyte.com, which explains electronic storage, said he doubted that storing the data would have been that problematic for the government.

"I'm thinking that excuse is just their easy way out," he wrote in an e-mail.

U.S. District Judge Linda Reade dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled.
Angulo, 59, was accused of improperly authorizing thousands of prescriptions for pain pills, diet medication and other drugs while working for Pharmacom International Corp., a Florida-based Internet company that operated from 2003 to 2004.
The company's doctors approved prescriptions without examining patients, communicating with them or verifying their identities, prosecutors said. Three Pharmacom officials and a person who recruited doctors were sentenced to prison. Eight physicians pleaded guilty to conspiracy to illegally distribute controlled substances and launder the proceeds

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Maybe we will run out of doctors..................