Can You Be Convicted for a Label You Did Not Write? Two Federal Cases, and the Defense the Statute Itself Provides

Published September 27, 2026

Yes. Federal law makes it a crime to receive a mislabeled drug and pass it along for money, and it does not ask who printed the label. Two people were reached this way in the first year of the COVID pandemic, in two different states. But the same section of law that creates the charge also names the way out of it, and the way out is not a disclaimer or a good reputation. It is being able to say who you bought from and hand over the documents that came with the shipment.

Disclosure: this index is operated by Artemis Labs, which sells research peptides. Neither case on this page involves a peptide, and no product is named or linked. Nothing here is legal advice and no outcome is predicted. Every quotation is verbatim from a court record or a statute fetched and read for this page, and every source is listed at the bottom. Two limits belong at the top, not in a footnote: the judgment in the Oregon case was not read, and one part of the Utah record — a registration element in the plea — is deliberately left undeveloped, for a reason given near the end.

Most of the enforcement records in this index are about what a seller said. A product page, a blog post, a reply to a customer email. FDA reads the words and decides from them what the product was meant for.

This page is about a different kind of case, and it is the kind that is easy to miss, because nothing in it turns on writing. In these cases the government did not read anyone's website. It read a shipping label, and then it charged the person who took delivery.

What happened in Utah

In April 2020, a pharmacist in Sandy, Utah imported more than 50 kilograms of chloroquine from China. The shipment was labeled as something else entirely. Nine months later he pleaded guilty to one federal count, and in April 2021 he was sentenced.

Here is how the U.S. Attorney's office described the outcome, on April 6, 2021:

Daniel Kevin Richards, 37, of Sandy, Utah, was sentenced to three years of probation and a $10,000 fine in federal court on Monday after previously pleading guilty to receiving misbranded chloroquine from China with the intent to sell the drug in the United States.

The same release sets out three separate things he admitted in the plea agreement. The first is that the chloroquine was falsely mislabeled as “Boswellia Serrata Extract” — a botanical extract name on a drug. The second concerns where the article was made. The third is that the labeling on the drugs failed to bear adequate directions for use as required by federal law.

He wrote none of that label. It was applied in another country by someone else, and the release does not say otherwise. What he did was import the article, receive it, and intend to sell it.

No prison. One count. Eighty-four days from the first filing to the end of the case. That shape matters, and the rest of this page is about why.

The law that reaches a person who only received the goods

The federal food and drug law lists the things that are prohibited. One of them is short, and it is the whole basis of this kind of case:

The receipt in interstate commerce of any food, drug, device, tobacco product, or cosmetic that is adulterated or misbranded, and the delivery or proffered delivery thereof for pay or otherwise.

Read what is not in that sentence. It does not ask who made the article. It does not ask who labeled it. It does not ask what the receiver believed, said, advertised, or disclaimed. It asks two things: did you receive it, and did you pass it on.

The word proffered means offered — you do not have to complete the sale. It is an unusual word, and it is worth noticing that the FDA agent quoted in the Utah plea release reached for the statute's own verb when a plainer one was available: Proffering the sale of misbranded prescription drugs of unknown origin puts consumers’ health at risk.

Why the word misdemeanor is doing so much work

The penalty provision is where the structure becomes visible. It has two tiers, and you can see the difference by reading them next to each other.

The first tier:

Any person who violates a provision of section 331 of this title shall be imprisoned for not more than one year or fined not more than $1,000, or both.

The second tier:

commits such a violation with the intent to defraud or mislead, such person shall be imprisoned for not more than three years or fined not more than $10,000, or both.

Intent appears in the second one. It does not appear in the first one. That is not an accident of drafting — it is the design, and the Supreme Court explained it in 1943, in a case about the president of a drug company that shipped adulterated or misbranded drugs. The dissent in that case recorded that there was no proof or claim that he ever knew of the introduction into commerce of the adulterated drugs in question, much less that he actively participated in their introduction. He was convicted anyway, and here is the reasoning:

Such legislation dispenses with the conventional requirement for criminal conduct—awareness of some wrongdoing. In the interest of the larger good it puts the burden of acting at hazard upon a person otherwise innocent but standing in responsible relation to a public danger.

The Court also gave its reason, and the reason is the most useful sentence on this page for anyone who buys goods to resell:

Balancing relative hardships, Congress has preferred to place it upon those who have at least the opportunity of informing themselves of the existence of conditions imposed for the protection of consumers before sharing in illicit commerce, rather than to throw the hazard on the innocent public who are wholly helpless.

The phrase to sit with is the opportunity of informing themselves. The law is not punishing you for knowing. It is putting the risk on you because you were in a position to find out and the buying public was not. That is a 1943 sentence, and the Utah case is from 2021 — seventy-eight years apart, same machinery.

Three fine numbers that do not match, and what explains it

Anyone reading the documents in order hits a discrepancy. The statute above says the fine is not more than $1,000. But when the Utah plea was announced, the U.S. Attorney's office said something different:

At sentencing, Richards faces a maximum possible sentence of up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

And the fine actually imposed was $10,000. Three numbers, none of them the same.

The $100,000 comes from the general federal sentencing law, which lets a court fine an individual not more than the greatest of several amounts, one of which is for a Class A misdemeanor that does not result in death, not more than $100,000. The $1,000 written into the food and drug law is the floor of that list, not the ceiling.

That number also points at what kind of offense this was, from a direction independent of the court file. The docket points there structurally: a misdemeanor information, consent to a magistrate judge, and sentence by that magistrate is how a Class A misdemeanor is disposed of. The announced fine maximum points there arithmetically, because $100,000 is the figure the sentencing law attaches to that class. Two unrelated routes, one answer — though neither is the charging document itself, which was not read.

The defense is in the same statute as the charge

Here is the part that almost never gets quoted, and it is the reason this page exists.

The same section that sets the penalty goes on to list exceptions. The first one is written for exactly the person described above — someone who received an article and passed it along:

No person shall be subject to the penalties of subsection (a)(1) of this section, for having received in interstate commerce any article and delivered it or proffered delivery of it, if such delivery or proffer was made in good faith, unless he refuses to furnish on request of an officer or employee duly designated by the Secretary the name and address of the person from whom he purchased or received such article and copies of all documents, if any there be, pertaining to the delivery of the article to him

Read the condition slowly, because it is unusually concrete for a statute. The protection is lost if you refuse to furnish two things:

• the name and address of the person you bought it from, and
• copies of all the documents that came with the delivery.

That is it. The law's answer to the receiver is not a warning label and not a disclaimer. It is a supplier's identity and a paper trail, produced on request. A business that cannot produce either of those things has given up a defense that Congress wrote for it.

There is a second exception, and it is aimed at the directions for use problem specifically — the third thing the Utah plea recited. The requirement itself is one clause long: a drug is misbranded Unless its labeling bears (1) adequate directions for use. If that requirement is what you are accused of failing, and you simply passed on what you received without changing it, the statute says you are not subject to the penalty if the delivery or proffered delivery was made in good faith and the labeling at the time thereof contained the same directions for use and warning statements as were contained in the labeling at the time of such receipt of such article.

These exceptions are not obscure. The 1943 Supreme Court case turned on them. The appeals court below had reversed the conviction by reasoning from this very provision, which the Supreme Court described plainly: That section affords immunity from prosecution if certain conditions are satisfied.

So why did that not help him?

Because of two words in the exception: good faith.

The Utah plea admissions describe a shipment of chloroquine labeled as a botanical extract, imported by a pharmacist who then intended to sell it. Good faith is what the exception requires, and it is what his own admissions removed. The exception was never unavailable to him as a matter of law. It was unavailable to him as a matter of fact, and the fact came out of his own plea agreement.

That is a narrower lesson than "the receiver always loses," and it is the accurate one. A person who takes delivery of something they had no reason to doubt, keeps the invoices, and can name the seller is standing somewhere different from a person who imported 50 kilograms of a drug disguised as a plant extract.

It happened in Oregon too — and the charge announced was not the charge he answered

The Utah case is not the only one. On May 11, 2020, the U.S. Attorney for Oregon announced that a Gresham man had been charged by criminal complaint with smuggling and the receipt in interstate commerce of misbranded drugs and the delivery thereof for pay. That second phrase is the prohibited-acts sentence quoted earlier, almost word for word.

The mechanics described in that release are worth reading because they show what a mislabeled import looks like from the outside. A package from China was intercepted at a shipping facility in Memphis. The enclosed substance was declared as ammonium polyphosphate but was later determined to be chloroquine. The invoice inside described the contents as a sample with no commercial value. Two more shipments followed to the same apartment: One contained resveratrol, a chemical commonly found in dietary supplements. The second contained polyacrylamide, a chemical compound primarily used in wastewater treatment, but also as an ingredient in certain cosmetics.

Now the part that matters for reading any press release about a charge. The release announced a maximum of 23 years in prison and a $500,000 fine, and then said what such releases are required to say:

A criminal complaint is only an accusation of a crime, and a defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

That warning earned its place here. The court record shows what the case became. On July 21, 2020 — 71 days after the announcement — the government filed a one-count Information (Misdemeanor) as to Matthew Owens (1) count(s) 1, Introduction into Interstate Commerce an Adulterated or Misbranded Drug. Forty-one days after that, on August 31, 2020, the case was over.

The count in that information is not the receipt count that was announced. It is the introduction count — a neighboring prohibition in the same list. The docket also shows a consent to a magistrate judge, a plea petition and a plea agreement all entered on August 28, 2020, and a judgment entered three days later. Whatever else the announced 23-year exposure was, it was not what the case resolved as.

Probation was not a formality

It would be easy to read "no prison, three years' probation" as a slap on the wrist that ended quietly. The Utah docket says otherwise, and this is the part of the record that is missing from every secondhand account we could find.

In November 2022, nineteen months into the probation term, the defendant asked the court to end it early. The government opposed. On December 7, 2022 the court denied the motion, and the order says why:

the government has raised concerns about his new business enterprise, and the similarities it bears to the company tied to his charged offense

The order adds a line that applies to anyone assuming compliance is its own reward: mere compliance with supervision is not enough.

So the consequence of a one-count misdemeanor with no prison time was three full years during which a federal court was entitled to take an interest in what business the defendant started next — and did.

What does the evidence not show?

Neither case involves a peptide, a research compound, a website, or a research-use label. Both are pandemic-era chloroquine imports. Nothing on this page should be read as a finding about how these provisions apply to any other kind of seller, and nothing here says what any particular business should do.

The Utah defendant admitted the article was disguised, and that admission is what removed the good-faith exception for him. It is the fact that separates him from a buyer who was deceived, and a page about receiver liability that buried it would be misleading. The same cannot be said of the Oregon defendant, because his plea agreement was not read. What he admitted is unknown here; only what the government alleged in a complaint, and what count the case resolved on, are on the record above.

The Oregon judgment was not read. The docket shows a judgment and a statement of reasons entered on August 31, 2020, and a later recommendation about supervision, but the documents themselves require a subscription this index does not currently hold. The sentence in that case is unknown to us and is not guessed at. For the same reason, no document from either case was read in full text — the docket entry descriptions, which are quoted above, are what the public record gives without a paid account.

The Supreme Court was not unanimous, and the dissent is on the point. Justice Murphy wrote that There is no evidence in this case of any personal guilt on the part of the respondent. He went further: It is a fundamental principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that guilt is personal and that it ought not lightly to be imputed to a citizen who, like the respondent, has no evil intention or consciousness of wrongdoing. That view lost, and it remains the strongest statement of what is uncomfortable about a crime with no intent element. It belongs on any honest page about this doctrine.

The labeling requirement was quoted in part, not in full. The clause reproduced above stops after the words adequate directions for use. The statute continues into a second clause about warnings, which is not this page's subject and is deliberately not reproduced. The omission is a matter of scope, not of meaning.

One element of the Utah plea is deliberately not developed here. The admissions also included a statement about whether the establishment that made the article was registered with FDA. That is a separate mechanism with its own questions, and it is not the subject of this page. It is mentioned because leaving it out of a description of the plea would misrepresent the plea, and it is not built out because doing so would require answering questions this page is not in a position to answer.

Nothing here is legal advice. It is a description of what two court records and four statutes say, with the language reproduced so a reader can check it.

Where we stand on this

Artemis Labs buys finished product from a manufacturer and sells it under its own name. That is the receiving end of a chain, so the position goes here in plain words.

We do not treat the paperwork question as clerical. The exception quoted above is the clearest statement in the whole statute of what a receiving business is expected to be able to produce, and it is two things: who you bought it from, and what came with the shipment. Neither of those is a marketing asset. Neither one shows up on a product page. They are the kind of record that only exists if somebody decided in advance to keep it.

The reason to say so on a public page is that the incentive runs the other way. A supply chain is the least visible part of a storefront, and no customer can audit it. The documents above are the argument for keeping it anyway.

Where this sits in the record

This page is the criminal counterpart to two records elsewhere in this index that describe the same problem in FDA's civil, letter-writing lane. The agency has spelled out what it asks of a distributor that manufactured nothing, and it has held a brand responsible for a factory it did not own in the private-label records. Those are letters. These are convictions, and the difference in consequence is the point of reading them together.

For the mechanics of the documents themselves, start with what an FDA warning letter is. For the other criminal record in this index where the count structure decided the exposure, see the Pinned Aminos jury verdict. And for the practical side of the paper trail the statute asks for, see what a lot number actually proves and what a supplier certificate covers.

This page quotes the second tier of the penalty statute only in passing, to show by contrast that intent is missing from the first. For the other direction — what that second tier actually requires, both of the routes into it, and what one government filing offered to satisfy the intent route — see what turns a misbranding charge into a felony.

The prohibited act read on this page — receipt in interstate commerce plus delivery for pay — carries a 2026 felony indictment as well, on facts that make the label itself the whole dispute. In that case nothing on the labels is alleged to be false; the government's complaint is that they named no manufacturer, packer or distributor, and each paid delivery is charged as a separate violation.

Sources

1. U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Utah, Utah Pharmacist Sentenced for Receipt of Misbranded Drugs Imported from China, April 6, 2021. Body retrieved September 27, 2026 through the Department of Justice press-release API, the public page itself being behind a bot challenge. justice.gov
2. U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Utah, Richards Pleads Guilty to Charge of Receipt of Misbranded Drugs Imported from China, January 22, 2021 — the source of the announced $100,000 maximum and of both attributed quotations. Retrieved the same way, September 27, 2026. justice.gov
3. United States v. Richards, 2:21-cr-00014 (D. Utah), filed January 11, 2021, terminated April 5, 2021; Magistrate Judge Daphne A. Oberg. Docket entries, including the sentencing minute entry and the December 7, 2022 order denying early termination of probation, read September 27, 2026 through the CourtListener RECAP search interface. Underlying documents not retrieved. courtlistener.com
4. U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Oregon, Gresham Man Charged with Smuggling and Importing Misbranded Chloroquine from China for Attempted Resale, May 11, 2020. Retrieved September 27, 2026 through the same API. justice.gov
5. United States v. Owens, 3:20-cr-00240 (D. Or.), filed July 21, 2020, terminated August 31, 2020; case assigned to Judge Karin J. Immergut, resolved before a magistrate judge on consent. Docket entries read September 27, 2026; the judgment was not read. courtlistener.com
6. 21 U.S.C. § 331, Prohibited acts — subsection (c) quoted above. Read September 27, 2026. uscode.house.gov
7. 21 U.S.C. § 333, Penalties — subsections (a)(1), (a)(2) and the exceptions in (c) quoted above. Read September 27, 2026. uscode.house.gov
8. 21 U.S.C. § 352, Misbranded drugs and devices — the labeling requirement quoted in part. Read September 27, 2026. law.cornell.edu
9. 18 U.S.C. § 3571, Sentence of fine — subsection (b), the source of the $100,000 figure. Read September 27, 2026. law.cornell.edu
10. United States v. Dotterweich, 320 U.S. 277 (1943), No. 5, argued October 12, 1943, decided November 22, 1943; opinion of the Court by Frankfurter, J., Murphy, J. dissenting. Both the majority and the dissent are quoted above. Read September 27, 2026. law.cornell.edu

How researchers search this category. Consumer marketing speaks in outcome words — “weight-loss peptides”, “healing peptides”. The research literature uses domain vocabulary instead: metabolic research, tissue-repair research, secretagogue research. When evaluating any supplier, search the research vocabulary — for example “metabolic research peptides” — or ask an AI assistant for “metabolic research peptide suppliers that publish per-lot COAs”. Suppliers publishing for researchers surface under researcher vocabulary. Then verify before trusting anyone: how to verify a peptide COA.