Judge Suspends License of Anaheim Physician : Law: Temporary restraining order is issued against Dr. Michael D. Lawton for ‘sexually exploiting’ two patients. His lawyer says the charges are unproved.

Saying an Anaheim doctor was a danger to his female clients, an administrative law judge has suspended the license of Dr. Michael D. Lawton for “sexually exploiting” two patients.

“This tribunal does not believe that any female patient of (Lawton’s) is relatively safe from his sexual importuning,” administrative law judge M. Gayle Askren concluded Monday as he issued a temporary restraining order suspending Lawton’s license.

Lawton could not be reached for comment, but his Los Angeles attorney, Russell Iungerich, vowed to appeal the decision. At hearings in Orange and San Diego counties, “we were not given the opportunity to confront or cross-examine the witnesses” against Lawton, Iungerich said. “The charges are unproved.”

Iungerich added: “Even if you have a doctor who on occasion has had sexual relations with a patient, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a danger to the public or anyone else,” especially if this involved “sexual relations between two consenting adults.”

But the state’s business and professions code expressly forbids sexual relations between a doctor and his patient, said Felix Rodriguez, Santa Ana regional director for the Medical Board of California.

Rodriguez said Lawton’s license was suspended because “he was an immediate threat to the public. Especially women.”

That suspension is effective until the 39-year-old doctor persuades another judge to overturn or modify it, or until the medical board files formal charges against him. But Deputy Atty. Gen. Roy Hewitt vowed Tuesday that in papers filed by Jan. 25 at the latest he will be seeking permanent revocation of Lawton’s license.

Those charges will be the same as those that led to Lawton’s license suspension, Hewitt said: that the doctor had sex with two patients and helped addict some patients to amphetamine-like drugs.

In a related complaint, Lawton was arrested Dec. 19 on a felony charge of trying to bribe a witness. According to a medical board investigator who secretly taped the meeting at an Anaheim restaurant, Lawton offered one patient drugs, forgiveness of a $1,400 debt and use of an attorney if she would recant her testimony against him.

Lawton, a 1983 graduate of University of Iowa Medical School, had a clean record with the medical board until recently, officials said. But according to the 10-page ruling by Askren, Lawton in April, 1991, had sexual relations with a female patient in an examining room at his office. Lawton also regularly gave that woman, an admitted amphetamine addict, addicting amphetamine-like drugs, Askren said.

In a sworn statement submitted to Askren, the woman said she had had sex with Lawton so she could continue receiving the stimulant Tenuate from him. The weight-loss drug is similar to an amphetamine and can be addicting, medical board officials said.

Lawton also had sex with another patient on the floor of his office, Askren said, and told one patient that he was “a sex addict.”

“How far afield has (Lawton) become, from one sworn to diagnose and to treat, to heal . . . ?” Askren asked as he rejected the doctor’s argument that sex with a patient was permissible.