A Kennebunk doctor is appealing her conviction after a federal jury last year found her guilty of writing illegal prescriptions for five patients.

Dr. Merideth Norris was convicted on 15 counts of unauthorized prescribing of a controlled substance. Each count represented a prescription that Norris wrote for five patients in 2021 and 2022. They included high dosages of opioids, sometimes dangerously combined with benzodiazepines, another controlled substance, according to prosecutors.

Her case will now go to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Norris was a well-known addiction medicine specialist, who still testifies against proposed legislation that would criminalize addiction, and was once president of the Maine Osteopathic Association and director of two methadone clinics, where people could receive medication to help with their withdrawal symptoms.

She was sentenced this month to three years of probation and community service, avoiding prison time. She is not appealing that sentence, which her lawyers said in an email that she was grateful for.

Her attorney, Timothy Zerillo, said they want to address “various pretrial issues” in her appeal, including some that they raised in 2023 regarding the constitutionality of the investigation into Norris’ work.

They previously tried throwing out evidence obtained through a search warrant that she argued omitted an important detail: that the Maine Board of Osteopathic Licensure had cleared her of wrongdoing in its own investigation.

Prosecutors mentioned the board investigation in their application for a warrant, but argued last year the board’s findings were shallow.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Torresen found that investigators “showed reckless disregard for the truth,” but still denied Norris’ request to throw out the evidence because she said police had enough corroboration beyond the board’s investigation to suggest that Norris’ patients were at risk, including investigations by other entities and opinions from medical experts.

Norris’ trial last June lasted two weeks. A jury heard at length from a medical doctor hired by prosecutors to review Norris’ patient records, as well as a pharmacist who reported one of Norris’ prescriptions to Walmart pharmacies, leading to a companywide block.

Several former patients defended Norris’ work overall. They said she took them in when other doctors would refuse care and treated them with dignity. Norris’ lawyers argued that she accepted many patients who were already taking high doses of opioids at other practices, whose doctors had retired.

Prosecutors said Norris still had an obligation to prescribe with caution. They said she ignored warnings from insurance companies that her prescriptions might carry risk, and indications that her patients were diverting their medication or also using illicit, non-prescribed drugs.

At sentencing, Torresen said it seemed Norris was “trying to help too many people for too long with too little.”

“The patients that were the subject of the indictment, there were red flags that should have caused you to stop prescribing,” Torresen told her. But the judge recognized that those 15 prescriptions were a sliver of Norris’ work. At one point, Norris said, she was caring for more than 400 patients.

Norris said she had to close her clinic, Graceful Recovery in Kennebunk, after her trial. She lost her malpractice insurance and does not have authority from the DEA to prescribe controlled substances.