Copyright Baton Rouge Advocate
For three years, Samrat Mukherjee was living the dream of being a young doctor. He had access to Baton Rouge hospitals, he wore a flight surgeon’s uniform to work, he often showed off his medical degree and he even threw himself a party to celebrate his graduation from medical school. But there was one glaring problem: It was all a lie. Part of what federal prosecutors described as a “yearslong fantasy” Mukherjee had of being a licensed physician. On Tuesday, a federal judge sentenced Mukherjee to 6 months in prison for masquerading as a doctor at several Baton Rouge-area hospitals. Mukherjee, 37, pleaded guilty in March to a felony count of making false statements relating to health care matters. The charge carried a 5-year maximum. But in their presentencing report, federal probation and parole investigators recommended a prison stint between 6 months and a year. U.S. District Judge John deGravelles opted for the low end, citing the fact that the defendant had no previous criminal history and has continued his education since being indicted. Mukherjee is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public health, with dreams of one day becoming a policymaker in the field. Despite those strides, the judge told Mukherjee he had to pay consequences for his fraudulent actions. “We are indeed lucky no injuries were suffered from this, but there very well could’ve been,” deGravelles said. “So the notion that this was just a young man trying to impress dates and it was a fantasy. No, this was real and it was real for three years. And in the court’s view, it was extremely serious.” Mukherjee was a Baton Rouge paramedic who worked for Acadian Ambulance Service, a medical transport company based in Lafayette. But in 2018, he began telling his friends and co-workers he was a licensed medical doctor. Although he never graduated medical school and hadn’t even completed his undergraduate studies at that point, Mukherjee began presenting a fake degree from the Tulane University School of Medicine. He wore clothes embroidered with “M.D.” and “Flight Surgeon” insignia and even created a fraudulent residency “match letter.” The fake credentials got him a resident physician’s badge at Baton Rouge General Medical Center under false pretenses. He wore a white lab coat embroidered with “Samrat Mukerjee M.D.” and he was granted full access to several other area hospitals. Mukherjee treated an undetermined number of patients and visited many of them in their hospital rooms. Prosecutors said at least one of those was a cancer patient. They pointed out that Mukherjee visited the ICU at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center at least twice in his doctor’s uniform to visit patients, who believed he was an actual physician. He called in 37 prescriptions to local pharmacies for himself and other patients between May 2019 and November 2022, claiming to be a credentialed doctor. He assumed the identities of two actual doctors and used their National Provider Identifier, or NPI, numbers to prescribe the meds under false pretenses. Mukherjee’s attorney noted the defendant never made any money off the ploy and suggested Mukherjee did it to impress the women he was dating. “This was social gamesmanship; poorly thought out, no doubt,” defense attorney Joseph Scott said. “Perhaps if you put on a white coat, you assume a certain level of authority. But nobody hung a shingle.” deGravelles disagreed with that assessment, pointing to the gravity of Mukherjee’s deceptions. “This was not purely a fantasy or game,” deGravelles said. “You were representing yourself to be a doctor, you were prescribing medicines to people — including to a cancer patient. And you were walking into patients’ rooms. You didn’t have to hang up a shingle. You were walking around a hospital wearing a uniform with a doctor’s emblem on it.” Dr. Loi le, a physician at Ochsner Medical Center, was one of the doctors whose identity Mukherjee used to prescribe medicines. He reported Mukherjee in December 2022. The men were longtime friends who met while attending undergraduate classes together at LSU. But Le said his former roommate’s actions limited his practice. He had to call Louisiana Board of Pharmacy to tell it to no longer accept call-in prescriptions in his name. Le told the judge about a 3-year-old patient with a skull fracture who Mukherjee examined and told the child to walk despite the severity of the injuries. He said his former friend showed a “profound lack of medical understanding,” and people could have been seriously hurt by his ill-advised treatments. “Once you put this coat on to see patients and introduce yourself as a doctor, it has meaning,” Le said as he slipped on his white doctor’s lab coat in the courtroom. “The patients put their faith in you. You don’t simply embroider your name on it and tell everyone in town that you’re a physician.”
