THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 39
“Figure out what happened,” she said.
Toth told her, “I think you know
something.”
The woman, as if suddenly compre-
hending her precarious position, said,
“Come with me.”
They all filed back into the apart-
ment. In the bedroom, she reached into
the closet and, sobbing, retrieved a bag-
gie of beige powder from the overhead
tracks of the sliding door.
She had made things better for her-
self by giving up the drugs, but worse
by lying. The detective who wanted to
arrest her told his colleagues, “I just don’t
have the patience for that shit. She knew
what fucking killed him.” (The man
died of a combination of cocaine, fen-
tanyl, and acetylfentanyl, a synthetic
opioid that can be up to a hundred times
more powerful than morphine; on the
street, it’s known as Apache, Jackpot,
and China White.)
At the very least, the detectives could
charge the girlfriend with obstruction
of justice and tampering with evidence.
It was also within their purview to book
her on involuntary manslaughter, and
let the courts figure it out.
It fell to Clark whether or not to ar-
rest the woman. Toth assured him that
he’d back him whatever he decided.
Clark thought for a moment, then said,
“Personally, I don’t think she ought to
be Code B’d.” With that, the woman
escaped Jamie Maynard’s fate.
N
ot long ago, Jamie’s mom asked her,
“Would you be alive right now if
you had gotten off ?” They were sitting
in the family room of Frank and Deb-
bie’s house one afternoon. Jamie thought
for a minute and said, “Probably not.”
She has now been sober for three years.
Whenever I visited the Bartons, Ja-
mie’s parents always sat together qui-
etly, on their sectional sofa, listening to
their daughter describe her life. At one
point, Debbie said, “I don’t understand
the whole addiction thing, so then I
get really mad.” Addiction, in her opin-
ion, was “a choice.” Jamie told her mom,
“It literally changes the chemicals in
your brain.”
According to the National Institute
on Drug Abuse, addiction is a complex
brain disease—“a medical illness,” not
a “moral failing.” Northeastern’s Action
Lab notes that addiction “alters brain
neurochemistry such that it compels a
person to satisfy cravings despite recog-
nized negative consequences.” In 2015, both
Jamie and Courtney would have suffered
“intolerable distress” at the prospect of
being unable to use heroin; they were
contending with a disease that had di-
abolically transformed their lives into
what the NIDA calls “a landscape of cues
and triggers, like a video-game environ-
ment cunningly designed to pose the
greatest challenge to his or her will-
power at every turn.”
A twisted distinction of overdose-
homicide cases is that many defendants
need the same mental-health and addic-
tion treatments that are offered to sur-
vivors of an overdose. The laws purport
to protect life, but they may actually in-
crease fatalities: a witness to an overdose
may be less likely to dial 911, for fear of
being prosecuted. Most Good Samari-
tan laws, which provide immunity to
people who call for help, don’t apply to
overdose-homicide cases. According to
the Northeastern study, the statutes “cre-
ate a quandary for people calling 911: you
(probably) won’t get in trouble if the per-
son experiencing an accidental overdose
event survives, but if death occurs, you’re
calling the cops on yourself.”
While Jamie was in prison, her par-
ents took care of her newborn daugh-
ter and her sons. (Timothy violated the
terms of his parole, and is back in
prison.) After she got out, she returned
to living with them. She and Jeremy
resumed their relationship. Three times
a week, they attend an A.A. meeting
together.
Even though Jamie is no longer in-
carcerated, her punishment, she discov-
ered, has not ended. Her trafficking
charge can eventually be expunged, but
an F1—a first-degree felony—is for life.
Barring a pardon or a special type of
appeal, which she cannot afford, she
will always be ineligible for certain hous-
ing and employment.
The state revoked her gaming license.
Last August, desperate after months of
looking for a job, she walked into a temp
agency and told a supervisor the whole
story. The agency found her a job as a
janitor at a factory. Jamie got up at five-
thirty every morning to mop floors and
clean toilets. She was home by the time
her kids got off the school bus. She took
weekend and holiday shifts, for the over-
time. In October, she received a promo-
tion, to quality control, making $14.50 an
hour. She would like a full-fledged job
at the plant but has delayed applying,
fearing that she’ll fail the company’s man-
datory background check.
Jamie sometimes regrets not allow-
ing her case to go to trial. She wonders
if there shouldn’t be a less severe kind of
criminal charge for defendants who are
not high-level traffickers. She wonders,
too, what a jury would have made of
Courtney’s autopsy, which revealed that
she died not strictly of a heroin overdose
but, rather, of a toxic combination of her-
oin and alprazolam—Xanax. Other sub-
stances found in her bloodstream in-
cluded the sedative lorazepam and the
depression medication Trazodone.
In another case, in nearby Licking
County, an appeals court recently over-
turned a conviction in a case involving a
mixture of heroin and cocaine. And last
year the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial
Court struck down a conviction because
prosecutors failed to prove that the de-
fendant knew that the heroin he’d given
a schoolmate would kill him. Because
overdoses are often medically ambigu-
ous, defendants might be wise to reject
a plea offer and take their cases to trial.
Leukel, the Florida attorney, told me,
“The hammer of the criminal-justice sys-
tem carries so much weight, people are
accepting responsibility for things they
shouldn’t be accepting responsibility for.”
If more prosecutors began losing such
cases, they might stop making overdose-
homicide charges against low-level
offenders, especially people struggling
with drug addiction themselves. This past
December, the family of a Franklin
County man who died after a friend gave
him heroin asked the court not to im-
pose a prison sentence. Such a punish-
ment, they said, would be “the worst pos-
sible outcome.” The dead man’s sister told
the judge, “It could easily have been the
other way around.”
