SJC thinks drug dealers don’t know heroin kills … seriously

When 20-year-old UMass Amherst junior Eric Sinacori died of a heroin overdose in 2013, there was a new kind of justice in the fact that Jesse Carrillo, who gave Eric the drugs, was convicted of manslaughter. That justice was short-lived because the state’s highest court tossed the conviction Thursday, saying that giving someone heroin is not the sort of thing anyone should be presumed to know creates a high risk of “substantial harm.”

Seriously.

Let’s put this in context. The same court that said Carrillo did not commit manslaughter when he gave a man heroin that killed him, recently ruled that Michele Carter did commit manslaughter when she spoke words, encouraging her boyfriend to kill himself.

Carter’s words were not themselves criminal. Carrillo’s purchase and possession of heroin were.

Carter’s boyfriend wanted to die. Sinacori did not.

Carter’s lawyers argued she didn’t commit manslaughter, because manslaughter requires conduct and words are not conduct. Giving someone heroin is conduct.

Carter struggled with serious mental health problems. Carrillo was a graduate student at UMass.

Is there any dispute about which behavior poses a greater risk of “substantial harm,” speaking words or giving someone heroin?

A manslaughter charge applies when the act that causes death was “wanton or reckless” with a “high degree of likelihood that substantial harm will result to another.” The SJC spent over 40 pages writing about why giving someone heroin doesn’t fit the bill. Most of us wouldn’t need two pages to explain why it does.

The real kicker came when the court ruling stated, repeatedly, that the definition of “substantial harm” means “overdose or death.” That’s like saying all the other harm heroin causes isn’t “substantial.” Think about that. There is no dispute that people addicted to opioids suffer enormous health and other consequences, but the SJC says that unless they overdose or die, those consequences are not “substantial harm.” The tens of thousands of people in Massachusetts struggling with opioid addiction, and their families, might beg to differ.

Even more troubling is that the court said to show a risk of “substantial harm,” the evidence would have to prove the heroin was unusually potent, or laced with fentanyl, or that the user was particularly vulnerable to overdosing because of his age, use of other drugs or prior overdoses. In other words, people with addiction who are under age 20 and those who haven’t yet overdosed should be targeted by dealers because if they die, there won’t be any serious charges.  Great message to drug dealers: go after the kids.

The law wasn’t always this bad in Massachusetts.

In 1990, the SJC found “all heroin of unknown strength … carries ‘a high probability that death will occur.” Smart and true. But here we are 30 years later, and the SJC now says heroin of unknown strength only carries a “significant possibility” of death, even though the heroin is more deadly and the loss of life is much worse.

With more people suffering and dying from addiction today than ever before, shouldn’t we be making the law tougher?

Justice is supposed to be blind, not foolish.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2og1pbM