THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 37
in Marysville. Judge Brown had warned
her not to apply for early release before
she had served at least half of her sen-
tence; she applied, anyway, and he de-
nied her. Last February, Jamie reapplied.
During two years in prison, she had be-
come sober, and had committed no in-
fractions. She had earned a community-
college degree, making the dean’s list
each semester. And she had completed
more than a dozen courses on such top-
ics as trauma, grief, relationships, par-
enting, and victim awareness. In a let-
ter to the court, she wrote, “I am just
asking you for a chance.”
The state opposed early release, as
did Courtney’s family. At a hearing, her
father said, “We’ve got to set an exam-
ple.” Judge Brown disagreed. He noted
that Jamie had largely led “a law-abid-
ing life,” and had committed an offense
“under circumstances not likely to recur.”
She had “shown genuine remorse” and
made “strides toward rehabilitation.”
Her “risk of recidivism” was “so low” that
he wanted to keep her out of transi-
tional housing, where some offenders
live when returning to society. “Placing
her with that population of people would
actually be detrimental,” he said. On
April 25, 2019, Jamie went home.
T
he rate of Franklin County’s un-
intentional-overdose deaths has
climbed since Jamie was indicted: in
2016, there were two hundred and sixty-
six opioid-related fatalities. Last year,
there were four hundred and twenty-
one in just the first nine months. This
spring, Franklin County will open a
thirty-seven-million-dollar coroner’s fa-
cility and, next year, a third jail.
Since 2015, Franklin County prose-
cutors have pursued twenty-nine over-
dose-homicide cases against twenty-
seven people. Fourteen of the defendants
had a criminal record there, including
felony drug trafficking, weapons viola-
tions, and robbery involving a firearm.
Thirteen defendants, Jamie among them,
had no record. Yet the Ohio statute
conflates a case like hers with that of a
defendant like Rayshon Alexander, who,
in 2016, continued to sell carfentanil-
tainted heroin even after learning that
his customers were “falling out”: two of
them died, and at least eleven others
suffered near-fatal overdoses. Alexander
was charged with murder. He pleaded
guilty to involuntary manslaughter—as
Jamie had—and to other felonies, and
was sentenced to fifteen years.
Facing a potentially long prison term,
overdose-homicide defendants usually
plead guilty. Only two Franklin County
cases have gone to trial. One ended in a
mistrial. The other involved a defendant,
Andrew Nichols, who used cocaine with
a young woman he had met
in rehab; after she fatally
overdosed, he wrapped her
body in trash bags and duct
tape, and hid it in his base-
ment. His landlord discov-
ered the corpse six weeks
later. Nichols was sentenced
to six years in prison.
Overdose-homicide task
forces are still being created
across the country, consum-
ing enormous resources. According to
a Drug Policy Alliance report, this ap-
proach is not “successful at either re-
ducing overdose deaths or curtailing the
use or sale of illegal drugs.” Beletsky, of
the Northeastern law lab, has written
that the “surging reliance on drug-in-
duced homicide charges” diverts re-
sources from public-health agencies that
“already operate in an environment of
extreme scarcity.” He pointed out that
Narcan is increasingly expensive, and
isn’t sufficiently accessible.
Lindsay LaSalle, who wrote the Al-
liance report, told me, “We have vested
too much discretion in individual pros-
ecutors.” The discretion extends to the
very definition of drug dealing. In one
Franklin County case, in 2016, prosecu-
tors considered it a “mitigating circum-
stance” that Lindsay Newkirk, who was
charged with involuntary manslaugh-
ter after injecting another user with her-
oin, was the victim’s own daughter. She
served two years in prison. Because the
relationship was familial, the prosecu-
tors were able to see Newkirk’s actions
as something other than drug dealing.
O’Brien, the chief prosecutor, told me,
“You can sympathize with that offender,
because she was herself an addict, her
dad was an addict, and she was just try-
ing to help him.”
O’Brien and I were talking in his
office, in downtown Columbus. We
were joined by Carol Harmon and
Jamie Sacksteder, assistant prosecutors
who have handled overdose-homicidecases since O’Brien agreed to formally
consider them. I asked how O’Brien’s
description of the Newkirks’ dynamic
was different from the one between
Jamie and Courtney. Jamie, O’Brien
said, “was doing it on a regular basis.”
He then acknowledged that perhaps
Lindsay Newkirk “was, on a regular
basis, getting drugs and using them,
and giving them to Dad,
too—I don’t know.”
Sacksteder offered that
the dad “couldn’t find a vein
on his own,” and that his
daughter was “basically help-
ing him, so he wouldn’t get
dope-sick.” I again noted the
similarities to Jamie May-
nard’s case. Harmon inter-
jected, “The daughter’s not
a dealer.”
At the hearing on Jamie’s early re-
lease, Harmon had told the court that
she had “re-looked” at the texts between
Jamie and Courtney, and still viewed
them as proof that Jamie was a dealer.
“People would reach out to her” for “a
hookup,” Harmon told the judge, add-
ing, “I’m not standing here telling the
court that she was some big-kilo amount
of drug dealer and mover, but Ms. Penix
died on April 27, 2015, and those are the
drugs that Ms. Maynard gave her.”
In O’Brien’s office, Harmon repeated
this argument, saying, “We had evidence
that Maynard—again, I’m not sitting
here saying that—”
“She’s not the French Connection!”
O’Brien said.
The Northeastern scholars call pros-
ecutors and law-enforcement officials
“the most powerful influence” behind
the “ethically dubious leap” between
overdose and homicide. They argue that
such a perversion of legislative intent
threatens to “flood the system”: the U.S.
homicide rate could spike considerably
if more police agencies embrace the
strategy.N
ate Smith, the sergeant who orig-
inally led the hope task force, told
me it bothered him that, in the past, “so
many people’s son or daughter would
die of an overdose, and seldom was a
police report even taken.” He and Min-
erd, both highly decorated law-enforce-
ment officials, felt that they were doing
good by treating unintentional overdoses