Jury in Stone Trial Ends 1st Day of Deliberations

Jurors ended their first day of deliberations Friday in the trial of Sergio C. Stone, the former UC Irvine fertility doctor charged with defrauding insurance companies and cheating on his income taxes.

Jurors deliberated for nearly three hours before adjourning. Deliberations will resume Tuesday.

Before U.S. District Judge Gary L. Taylor handed the case to the jury, the attorneys made their final pleas.

Stone’s attorney, John D. Barnett, told jurors that his client, a world-renowned doctor, would not have risked his professional reputation to participate in a criminal scheme.

According to Barnett, his client was accused of duping the insurance companies out of about $2,000 over a four-year period. That amounted to $2 a day, Barnett said.

“He wouldn’t [ruin his reputation] for $2 a day or for any amount,” Barnett said.

Barnett also attempted to refute prosecutors’ suggestion that Stone was plotting to leave the country in 1995, before he was indicted. The prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attys. Thomas H. Bienert Jr. and Wayne Gross, cited Stone’s wiring of $600,000 in cash to his native Chile and his decision to sell a Laguna Beach home at an $80,000 loss.

But Barnett said that “if there was a guilty bone in his body,” the 57-year-old Stone would have retired to Chile instead of remaining in the United States.

Stone’s former partners--Jose Balmaceda and Ricardo H. Asch--fled the country after the three doctors were indicted on multiple counts of mail fraud, filing false income tax returns and conspiracy to commit tax fraud.

The charges grew out of a massive investigation into allegations that human eggs and embryos were stolen from women at UCI’s now defunct Center for Reproductive Health and transplanted into other women.

In his rebuttal, Bienert told jurors that some evidence in the case was irrefutable, citing documents showing the doctors kept two sets of accounting records so that they could skim cash from their clinics and underreport their earnings to the Internal Revenue Service.

“This case is about a pattern,” Bienert said, referring to other records that showed the doctors routinely used unlicensed personnel in surgeries but billed as if the work had been performed either by another member of the medical team or by another licensed physician.

Bienert also said Stone had returned from Chile because he didn’t know the extent to which the government had been investigating the fertility scandal.

“They didn’t use a gun [or] a knife,” Bienert told jurors. “They stole by lying and with the knowledge that people would take their word [as doctors] at face value. They used that to cheat and steal.”