15 Feb Bill would make deadly fentanyl sales murder | Crime and Courts
Maryland senators are scheduled to hold a hearing next week on a Southern Maryland colleague’s bill to make sales of a synthetic opioid contributing to a death a crime of murder, a proposal backed by a prosecutor who pursued that legal tactic in court.
St. Mary’s State’s Attorney Richard Fritz (R), who obtained convictions for lesser drug crimes or manslaughter last year in a series of cases, said this week at his office that the bill presented by state Sen. Jack Bailey (R-St. Mary’s, Calvert) would make the lethal-distribution offense by law an act of second-degree murder. Seven additional legislators are cosponsoring the bill assigned to the senate’s judicial proceedings committee.
Previous efforts in Maryland to enact that proposal “have never made it out of committee,” Fritz said Wednesday. “Fentanyl kills Republicans and Democrats equally,” he said, and this year’s proposal “is the most bipartisan bill that’s ever been considered.”
So far this year in St. Mary’s, one person’s death has been confirmed to be from a drug overdose, a sheriff’s office spokesperson said Thursday, following 30 overdose deaths in the county in 2018.
“You can’t treat people if they’re dead,” Fritz said.
Amid last year’s overdose death prosecutions in St. Mary’s courthouse, an appeals court opinion in an Eastern Shore case, involving heroin, found that the drug’s distributor could not be convicted of a homicide offense, in part on grounds that drug dealers act not with a reckless disregard for their customers’ survival, but instead with a vested interest in their survival to buy more drugs.
“That’s the first time I have seen a court place an economic model on something that is so deadly and unlawful,” Fritz said, adding that the attorney general’s office is seeking to have the opinion overturned by the Maryland Court of Appeals.
If the current bill is enacted into law, the prosecutor said, its language that the distribution of fentanyl or an analogue need only be “a contributing cause of the death” addresses autopsies finding combinations of drugs in a victim.
Fritz said that even if a drug dealer does not know that the mix of drugs they sell includes fentanyl, under the new bill, “You’re responsible for your act.”
A conviction for the murder offense would carry a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison.
John Darling, whose son died in 2017 from a drug overdose, witnessed the dismissal of charges against the man accused of selling the drugs.
Darling said Thursday of the legislative proposal, “I think that’s a good law. Maybe it will save some lives. Maybe.”
The bill would not criminalize the lawful prescription or administration of fentanyl to a patient.
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