Pubdate: Mon, 09 May 2016
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2016 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Rob Kuznia

HARSHER FATE FOR SUPPLIERS OF FATAL HIGH

Heroin's Fast Rise Propels States to Charge Family, 911 Callers With Murder

"I think a person who supplies illegal drugs to a person that kills 
them is . . . no different than a person who shoots somebody with a 
gun." David Hickton, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania

When Jarret McCasland and his fiancee decided to celebrate her 19th 
birthday with heroin, it meant the end of her life and the end of his freedom.

Flavia Cardenas, who worked in a nightclub, died of an overdose the 
next morning in Baton Rouge. After a prosecutor convinced a jury that 
McCasland administered the fatal dose, the 27-year-old pipe 
fabrication shop worker was found guilty of second-degree murder. He 
was sentenced to life in prison in February with no chance for parole.

With deaths from heroin and opioids at their highest level in U.S. 
history, prosecutors have begun charging those who supplied the final 
dose with murder, even when that person is the deceased's friend, 
lover, sibling or spouse.

The new initiative is sometimes in direct conflict with good 
Samaritan laws, which protect addicts from being charged if they call 
911 when a fellow user is overdosing. The tougher approach also is in 
marked contrast to a growing movement that seeks to treat drug 
addiction as a disease and public-health crisis rather than criminal behavior.

Prosecutors in New Jersey, Tennessee, West Virginia and Louisiana 
have recently dusted off dormant War on Drugs-era laws to subject 
sellers and providers to homicide charges and stiff sentences on par 
with convictions for shooting, beating or poisoning people to death. 
In New York, Ohio and Virginia, lawmakers have introduced bills to 
allow murder charges to be filed in drug-overdose deaths.

In New Hampshire, the attorney general is partnering with federal 
prosecutors to investigate all opiate-overdose deaths as crimes 
instead of accidental deaths. A particular focus of the crackdown is 
fentanyl, which in 2015 surpassed heroin in drug overdose deaths in 
the state. The synthetic opiate is far more potent than heroin and is 
often added to intensify the high and cut production costs.

In Pennsylvania, where the exasperated Lycoming County coroner 
announced in March that he would begin categorizing heroin overdose 
deaths as homicides on death certificates, the federal government 
also has begun ratcheting up penalties for even low-level dealers 
whose products cause bodily harm or death.

"I think a person who supplies illegal drugs to a person that kills 
them is committing an act of violence," said David Hickton, U. S. 
attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, who in 2015 was 
tapped by then-U. S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to co-chair 
a national heroin task force. "It's no different than a person who 
shoots somebody with a gun."

What is different is a focus on the bottom of the supply chain, when 
investigators once prioritized putting away those at the top.

The heftier criminal charges come even as more locales are deploying 
their police as first-aid workers always on patrol with the antidote 
naloxone, which restores breathing and often saves the lives of 
heroin-overdose victims. A pilot program outside Cincinnati sends 
police and emergency crews with drug-addiction counselors on 
follow-up visits to the homes of people who have recently overdosed.

Taken together, the swirl of sometimes conflicting new initiatives - 
efforts to get users into treatment instead of putting them in jail, 
the clampdown on suppliers and dealers, dramatic differences across 
state lines on what constitutes behavior worthy of a murder charge- 
reflects how the devastating speed of heroin's wrath in large 
sections of the country has left authorities scrambling for solutions.

"We are all just kind of at a loss," said Lt. Liz Scott of the 
sheriff 's department in Spotsylvania County, Va.

Disparity for 911 callers

Between 2011 and 2014, the number of heroin overdose deaths in the 
United States soared from about 4,400 a year to more than 10,000, 
according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Factor in 
prescription opioids and the 2014 death toll rises to 28,647 - a 
record high, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To try to save lives, about 30 states have passed good Samaritan laws 
exempting drug users from prosecution for minor drug violations when 
they call 911 and stay with a friend who is suffering from an 
overdose, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. But in states with 
no such law, a 911 call can be a precursor to a murder charge and a 
new level of family devastation.

That's what happened to 39 year-old William Moore, of Spotsylvania 
County, when he called 911 during the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 26, 
after finding his wife, Ashley, unresponsive in their mobile home.

Because Moore admitted to deputies that he had given Ashley the 
heroin- and even though his wife injected the heroin herself-he was 
charged with felony murder. Moore, who authorities say is an addict 
and a dealer, also has been charged with child endangerment, because 
two of the couple's children, ages 2 and 10, were home at the time.

Scott acknowledged that Moore apparently wasted little time in dialing 911.

"There is no evidence that he waited to clean up the area," she said. 
"He certainly wanted to render aid to his wife. He was cooperative."

Another complication in cracking down on sellers while providing help 
for users is that the line between the two is often blurred.

"A lot of people who deal drugs are addicts, even though they are 
caught selling or trafficking," said Inimai Chettiar, director of the 
Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York 
University's School of Law. "If you go after the person who sold to 
the person who wound up dying, you're not really going after the 
people who are responsible for the drug trade-the kingpins."

On much of the East Coast, authorities are showing unprecedented 
leniency to users while cracking down hard on heroin dealers - a 
polarity highlighted by two specific proposals in the state of New York.

In Ithaca, Mayor Svante Myrick (D) has proposed creating the nation's 
first injection center where addicts can shoot up under the 
supervision of medical workers equipped with naloxone.

Meanwhile, the New York state Senate last June passed a bill-named 
"Laree's Law" after 18-year-old Laree Farrell-Lincoln, who died of a 
heroin overdose three years ago - that would enable prosecutors to 
charge heroin dealers with homicide when their product can be linked 
to a death.

Farrell-Lincoln was the only child of Patty Farrell. She was a 
straight-A student and a cheerleader. She was also strong-willed and 
curious, Farrell said, and tried heroin on a whim. Her descent was 
rapid. She lost 30 pounds in a month and quickly confessed to 
Farrell, a retired Albany police officer, that she was an addict.

"She would be sitting with me on the love seat and she was just high 
as a kite," Farrell said. "It was gut-wrenching. She'd be sitting up, 
falling asleep, eyes halfclosed."

After a 28-day stint in rehab, she relapsed, and her spiral resumed.

One morning, as Farrell was making coffee, she called upstairs to her 
daughter, and heard no response. She ran upstairs, opened the bedroom 
door and found Laree facedown in bed, eyes open.

"She was the love of my life; I just lived for that kid," Farrell 
said. "Heroin took her down in four months."

On both sides of the addict-supplier divide, families are left in shambles.

In New Orleans, Chelcie Schleben, 23, and her ex-boyfriend Joshua 
Lore, 25, were locked up for a year and a half as they awaited trial. 
Schleben and Lore were charged with the murder of Kody Woods, who 
died of an overdose while the three, all in their early 20s, were 
using heroin in a home in the city's Gentilly neighborhood in 2014. 
The two pleaded guilty Tuesday and were sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In a sense, the Woods family lost two members in this tragedy: Woods 
and Lore were best friends who had palled around since middle school.

"It was a brother relationship," said Woods's oldest sibling, Tonya 
Hebert, 38, who became their mother's right hand after the 1999 death 
of their father, and then the family's de-facto parent after the 2008 
death of their mother. "They would do normal boy things - rims on 
their cars, paintballing, going to the movies. . . . They did so much 
in life together."

Steven Coleman of Charleston, W.Va., 27, grew up in a troubled home 
of addicts, according to family members and his attorney. He found 
his mother in bed, dead of a methadone overdose, in 2004 and got 
addicted to painkillers prescribed for stomach pain in 2010. When the 
pills became difficult to acquire, he turned to heroin.

On Valentine's Day in 2015, Coleman's father, who lived with him, 
asked him for heroin. Coleman supplied it on a plate, and the father 
went into a bedroom and used it with a female friend - 43-year-old 
Melody Ann Oxley - who died that night of an overdose, according to 
the criminal complaint. Coleman discovered Oxley and called 911, but 
he left the house before responders arrived.

In what is said to be the first case of its kind in Kanawha County, 
Coleman was charged with first-degree murder. Coleman sat in jail for 
nearly a year awaiting trial before he pleaded guilty on April 27 to 
lesser charges. Although the murder charge was dismissed, Coleman, 
who was facing life in prison, said the experience has cost him his reputation.

"It affected me greatly," he said during a phone call from South 
Central Regional Jail, where he was held without bail. "It ruined how 
people view me. It ruined everything I ever had."

Heroin, which he snorted, consumed his life. "It took away all my 
pain, all my worry and stress," he said.

After he was jailed, Coleman rode out the withdrawal symptoms with 
the aid of detox medication but endured sleepless nights, loss of 
appetite and the pins-and -needles of restless-leg syndrome.

'Distort what they've done'

The shift toward stringency bucks a broadening bipartisan push across 
the United States to roll back the tough-on-crime policies of the 
1980s and ' 90s that locked up untold numbers of nonviolent drug 
offenders, fueling mass incarceration.

Some crime experts say the current crackdowns seem all too 
reminiscent of the old ways.

Douglas Husak, a legal-philosophy professor at Rutgers University, 
said slapping dealers with murder charges is not only excessive, but 
misleading.

"You want the labels of what criminals have done to give people some 
kind of idea of what crime they've committed," he said. "You don't 
want to call somebody a rapist if what he did was grope somebody. I'm 
not condoning groping, but you've misrepresented what he's done. To 
call people who sell heroin 'murderers' seems to distort what they've 
done. Call it like it is - they are drug dealers."

But prosecutors and police leaders say heroin's surging death toll 
has necessitated a tougher and more sophisticated approach to policing.

"It doesn't follow that to be smart on crime you have to be soft on 
crime," said Hickton, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of 
Pennsylvania. After his 25-county district was besieged in August by 
a deadly strain of heroin cut with fentanyl, he announced that his 
office would lock up heroin dealers for 20 years to life if it could 
be proved that their product killed. Previously, drug charges have 
generally been tied to the quantity of drug seized or sold.

Tom Synan, police chief in Newtown, Ohio, and the head of a heroin 
task force in Hamilton County, agrees with the strategy, saying many 
dealers are well aware of the dangers of heroin and the more-potent fentanyl.

"In many cases, not only do they have prior knowledge, they are the 
ones helping to mix it," he said. "Tome that is more than just a 
street drug. You are intentionally fueling the addiction and giving 
[users] a product that is extremely dangerous and could cause their 
death, and you know it."

That profile of a calculating heroin dealer is unrecognizable to Doug 
McCasland, the father of Jarret McCasland. He said his son's 
incarceration is an outrage.

McCasland, 60, says he believes Jarret has been wrongfully convicted 
and is hiring a new attorney to file an appeal. "He is totally 
innocent," he said. In the meantime, the elder McCasland said he is 
struggling to sleep at night. The father-son duo were close; they 
worked at the same plant and often carpooled together, leaving at 5 
in the morning.

"They took our son from us," he said. "The sentence they gave him is 
a living execution. . . . You would not believe the kind of person he 
is versus the kind of person they portray."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom