32 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
deception; she was in profound legal
trouble. A young woman just like Jamie
was dead. Frank and Debbie couldn’t
imagine what Courtney’s family was
going through, any more than they could
fathom the idea of Jamie—who had
never been in legal trouble—being held
responsible for a homicide.
Eight days later, when Jamie reported
for work, investigators were waiting to
arrest her. They confiscated her phone,
expecting her texts to match Court-
ney’s; they swabbed the inside of her
mouth, expecting her DNA to align
with forensic evidence collected from
Courtney’s car.
After Jamie spent the night in the
county jail, her parents bailed her out
and took her home. Cut off from her-
oin, she was soon, as she later told me,
“flopping on the floor like a fish.” One
of her sisters drove her to the emergency
room, and Jamie spent the next few days
in hospital detox.
Jamie and her family met with Mark
Collins, a former Franklin County pros-
ecutor who was now a well-known crim-
inal-defense attorney in Columbus. Ja-
mie’s situation infuriated him. More and
more, law-enforcement officials and
prosecutors were treating fatal overdoses
as homicide cases. Overdose deaths were
a tragedy, Collins believed, but they
weren’t crimes unless the drugs had been
given maliciously. What Jamie needed
was treatment, not prison.
Jamie faced a kind of criminal pros-
ecution that takes various forms, depend-
ing on the jurisdiction. Such cases have
been categorized as “drug-induced ho-
micide,” “murder by overdose,” “drug de-
livery resulting in death,” and “overdose
homicide.” More than two dozen states
now have laws allowing prosecutors to
bring felony charges against anyone who
provides drugs that prove fatal. States
without specific legislation, such as Ohio,
can indict a supplier under existing stat-
utes: manslaughter, depraved heart, reck-
less homicide, murder. Potential punish-
ments range from a year in prison to
death. According to a recent study by
the Northeastern University School of
Law’s Health in Justice Action Lab, pros-
ecutors in almost every state have exer-
cised the overdose-homicide option.
Legal experts have traced these pros-
ecutions to the fatal overdose of Len
Bias, a superstar forward at the Univer-
sity of Maryland, who collapsed on June
19, 1986, in his dorm suite. Less than
forty-eight hours earlier, he’d been
drafted by the Boston Celtics.
Bias had taken high-quality cocaine,
but politicians and the media neverthe-
less associated his death with the na-
tion’s burgeoning crack epidemic. The
Democrats were trying to retake the
Senate, and wanted to prove that they
could be tough on crime. House Speaker
Tip O’Neill urged Congress to craft
forceful antidrug legislation that candi-
dates could cite in their reëlection cam-
paigns. Eric Sterling, then the assistant
counsel for the House Judiciary Com-
mittee, later recalled that lawmakers
drafted the legislation without holding
a single hearing, adding, “We did not
consult with the Bureau of Prisons, or
with the federal judiciary, or with D.E.A.,
or with the Justice Department.”
That October, Congress passed the
Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. It estab-
lished mandatory minimum prison sen-
tences for a range of narcotics crimes,
including a “death resulting” offense in-
volving the sharing or the sale of drugs.
Sterling, now the director of the Crim-
inal Justice Policy Foundation, which
focusses on failed drug policy, has noted
that Congress assumed the legislation
would lead law-enforcement officials to
target “high-level traffickers.” But Amer-
ica’s prisons soon filled with low-level
offenders; illicit drug use and traffick-
ing continued unabated.
Policymakers and scholars eventu-
ally agreed that neither harsh penaltiesnor the threat of them significantly de-
ters drug use and sales. But in the mean-
time dozens of states enacted their own
versions of the federal law, including the
overdose-homicide provision. At first,
the option went largely unused: the
Northeastern law lab recently attempted
to chronicle the history of such cases,
and found hardly any from the eighties
and nineties. But in the past two de-cades, as opioid addiction escalated and
overdoses became the leading cause of
death in America for people under fifty,
police officers and prosecutors seized
upon the overdose-homicide alterna-
tive as a new “tool.” Now there are many
hundreds of such cases a year.
Like the federal law, the state stat-
utes ostensibly targeted “high-level
traffickers” and “repeat offenders.” Some
career criminals have been caught in
this way. Last year, a New Jersey woman
fatally overdosed on fentanyl-tainted
heroin; police charged the man who
purportedly provided her with the drugs,
and also Curtis Geathers, the man’s al-
leged source. Geathers had multiple pri-
ors: in the early two-thousands, he was
prosecuted for attempted murder and
went to prison for aggravated assault;
in 2016, he pleaded guilty to trafficking
after police found nearly six hundred
packets of heroin, plus cash and crack,
in his hotel room.
But, as Northeastern has reported,
overdose-homicide prosecutions tend
to sweep up minor offenders who are
“struggling with addiction and who pur-
chase drugs on behalf of themselves
and their peers.” Leo Beletsky, the di-
rector of the Northeastern law lab, stud-
ied two hundred and sixty-three pros-
ecutions that occurred between 2000
and 2016, and found that about half of
the defendants were “friends, family, or
romantic partners” of the person who
died. In Wisconsin, Daniel Adams, a
defense attorney, surveyed a year’s worth
of his state’s cases, from 2015, and found
that only nineteen of eighty-one de-
fendants were “commercial drug deal-
ers.” In a sentencing memo, Adams
defined commercial drug deals as “de-
liveries that were performed solely for
financial benefit—not by another ad-
dict/middleman/connection for joint
use or to otherwise support their own
addiction.”
Lee Hoffer, a medical anthropologist
at Case Western Reserve who studies
local heroin markets as “complex adap-
tive systems,” identifies this subset of users
as “brokers.” He has written that “a buyer
trusts the broker to make a purchase and
return with drugs; a broker trusts that if
they do so the buyer will reward them.
In this way, brokering is a ‘favor’ and an
economic service.” One prosecutor told
me, “Yeah, we call that a drug dealer.” But