How Helping Someone Buy Drugs Can Send You to Prison for 20 Years
State and federal prosecutors responded to fentanyl overdoses by treating accidents as homicides.
Eight years ago, Scott Hancock, then 28, helped a 19-year-old acquaintance, identified in court records as T.G., buy fentanyl. At her request, Hancock, who had been addicted to opioids for years, got in touch with his drug dealer, who gave him five capsules that he handed over to T.G. in exchange for $20. Then Hancock gave the money to his dealer. Because T.G. subsequently died from a fentanyl overdose, Hancock is serving a 20-year sentence at a federal prison in Illinois.
That was the mandatory minimum sentence under 21 USC 241, which prescribes penalties for drug distribution resulting in death. Although that law has been on the books since 1986, the dramatic increase in fentanyl-related deaths during the last decade prompted a surge in federal drug prosecutions involving overdoses, which rose by 44 percent between FY 2019 and FY 2023. Hancock's case was part of that trend, and it prompted his mother, G.D. Hancock, a retired finance professor, to delve into the subject, resulting in a database that sheds light on what happens when the government treats accidental deaths as homicides.
So far, Hancock has identified 2,930 sentences in such cases since 2010. That includes 1,399 federal cases and 1,531 state cases, which rely either on laws dealing specifically with drug-induced deaths or on more general statutes addressing felony murder, "depraved heart" homicide, or manslaughter.
Sentences of 20 years or more were pretty common at the federal level, accounting for 37 percent of the cases, compared to 13 percent at the state level. The vast majority of the cases (84 percent) were resolved by plea deals. That is not surprising, given the potential consequences of going to trial. While the median sentence for defendants who pleaded guilty was nine years, it was 20 years for defendants who insisted on making the government prove its case.
Hancock's tally is based on news reports, court records, announcements by state and federal prosecutors, her own "case files and research," and "cases sent in by families, lawyers and researchers." A separate database compiled by researchers at Northeastern University, drawn from news reports, includes 3,264 cases involving drug-induced homicide from 2011 to 2022.
These prosecutions are morally nonsensical. They treat people who voluntarily consume drugs as helpless victims of supposed predators who gave them the drugs they wanted. By similar logic, bartenders and liquor store owners should be held criminally liable whenever a customer succumbs to alcohol poisoning or the long-term effects of heavy drinking. The main difference is the legal status of the drug, which is arbitrary, politically determined, and historically contingent. And while illegal drugs pose special hazards, that is a result of prohibition, which creates a black market where product composition is highly variable and unpredictable.
Charging people with homicide based on accidental overdoses would be illogical and unjust even if the defendants were limited to actual drug dealers. But you can be charged with drug-induced homicide even if your "trafficking" consisted of nothing more than sharing drugs with a relative, romantic partner, friend, or acquaintance. Based on the information Hancock was able to glean, she counts 241 cases where the person who died from an overdose was the defendant's friend, partner, or family member, and other sources suggest such prosecutions are common.
The Northeastern University researchers analyzed a sample of 213 online news reports from 2000 to 2017. They found that 50 percent of defendants charged with drug-induced homicide were caretakers, family members, friends, or partners of the people who died.
In 2021, when the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review examined Pennsylvania prosecutions for "drug delivery resulting in death" (DDRD), it described a case involving "a Westmoreland County man" who "died from an overdose of drugs he'd gotten from a friend of a friend of a friend." Although "the drugs ultimately came from a man called 'Bee' in Penn Hills," the paper noted, "the three individuals between the victim and Bee were all charged" with DDRD, a first-degree felony punishable by up to 40 years in prison.
The Tribune-Review described several other DDRD defendants, including "a Delmont woman" who "called paramedics when she found her boyfriend unresponsive in their bathroom"; "two friends" who bought heroin for a man who overdosed at a Taco Bell; and "a Monessen woman" who "sent her cousin to buy a brick of heroin" and "sold five stamp bags to a friend, who then sold four bags to an Elizabeth Borough man who died from a fatal overdose."
The Tribune-Review also found that "many facing these charges are relatively low-level dealers." Jonathan Fodi, a defense attorney and former prosecutor, told the paper he and his colleagues had never seen a DDRD case involving a high-level dealer. Given the need to prove a link between the defendant and the person who died, that is not surprising. But that situation compounds the injustice of treating such deaths as homicides, since low-level dealers often do not know exactly what is in the drugs they are selling.
A 2002 analysis of 32 drug-induced homicide prosecutions, published in the New Jersey Law Journal, found that "25 involved prosecution of friends of the decedent who did not sell drugs in any significant manner." According to a 2017 report by a Wisconsin TV station that looked at the 100 most recent prosecutions for drug-induced homicide in that state, "nearly 90% of those charged were friends or relatives of the person who died, or the lowest people in the drug supply chain." When the Chicago Tribune examined drug-induced homicide cases filed between 2011 and 2014, it found "the defendant was typically the last person who was with the person who overdosed."
Even people who support the war on drugs should be able to recognize the injustice of sending people to prison for 10 or 20 years based on their tangential roles in deaths they neither caused nor intended. And far from making such deaths less likely, that policy impedes potentially lifesaving medical assistance because the risk of a homicide charge is apt to discourage bystanders from calling for help. That daunting deterrent undermines the goal of "Good Samaritan" laws that are supposed to shield 911 callers from criminal charges in such situations.
The official justification for such prosecutions is completely disconnected from the reality of these cases. "Deaths from illicit drugs, especially fentanyl, are at historic highs," the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said in a 2023 press release. Because the DEA is "committed to protecting Americans and saving lives by pursuing those responsible," the agency explained, it aims to "make sure as many drug traffickers involved in those deaths as possible get an appearance in front of a judge."
As an example of that strategy, the DEA cited Scott Hancock's case, describing him as a "trafficker" who was "found guilty of providing the drugs that killed a 19-year-old woman in 2018." Given the details of that transaction, it is hard to see the logic here. Sending someone like Hancock to prison for 20 years has nothing to do with "saving lives."