Posted on 09/27/2022 6:24:52 AM PDT by artichokegrower
An 18-year-old from Bloomington has been charged with murder on allegations that he sold and distributed opiods that led to the overdose death of a Highland teen.
(Excerpt) Read more at ktla.com ...
Good
Is there a statute that specifies that selling fentanyl is considered murder? I doubt it. It’s drug distribution. I mean, it could be murder if the seller forcefully administered the drug against the user’s will. Otherwise, I don’t see how it’s not the user’s fault.
Do you want firearms manufacturers held liable for bad actors after they sell their products? Or car manufacturers? Pharmaceutical companies for abuse of their legal products?
Maybe negligent homicide.
Fentanyl is camouflaged as another not deadly drug or eve candy. It would be like disguising a hand grenade as a child’s toy. I am not ready to surrender our country to the Chinese manufacturers and Mexican cartels
“Do you want firearms manufacturers held liable for bad actors after they sell their products?”
Well if you knowingly sell or lend a firearm to someone you know is disqualified by a felony, mental illness, drug use, etc. you are liable. Not the manufacturer but the dealer.
I was in the gun store looking at riflescopes and two guys were in there looking at Saturday Night Specials. The store clerk came up to them and said “You both smell of marijuana. You have to leave the store.” They did leave.
Problem now is fentanyl is now made to look like pieces of candy and could easily be mistaken for goodies by a child. They call it “rainbow fentanyl”. So if you knowingly sell this stuff, yes you could be charged with distribution and homicide:
https://www.kxly.com/spokane-dad-charged-with-homicide-for-young-daughters-fentanyl-overdose/
No loose candies this Halloween, only packaged candy.
It’s still the user’s responsibility for what goes into his body. Again, if the seller misrepresented what he was selling, maybe there’s a civil case for fraud in the inducement.
The seller probably doesn’t know what the ingredients are either — find a reputable drug dealer if you want to use street drugs.
The statutes will vary by State, but yes. Providing a known deadly controlled substance, probably of unnown strenghth, illegally to a user resulting in their all too predictable death is considered murder. Fentanyl belongs to a class of drugs subject to the highest regulation because it is so toxic. Controlled substances must be prescribed by licensed physicians for specific medical purposes, at sprecified concentrations and dosages. If the same dealer sold the user an unopened bottle of aspirin, and the user had some weird reaction to it and died, that would not be murder, because aspirin is not a controlled substance.
The analogy is not to normal products that work as intended. I would want gun manufacturers to be liable if they sold firearms that routinely blew up, killing the shooter, or car manufacturers to be liable if half their vehicles randomly veered off to the left causing 100,000 head-on collisions per year.
Caveat Emptor.
I have no sympathy for the dealer. Throw the book at him, but I have no sympathy either for the user. If you are to stupid to use, then you will overdose eventually.
The responsibility for the death of the user belongs to the user.
Yes, addiction is sad, and it is often impossible to overcome. But it is not society’s fault when an addict dies from an overdose.
If you want to cast a wide net, why not charge his mom with murder for leaving enough money in her purse for him to steal?
Perhaps the owner of the house he just robbed for leaving out easily fenced electronics that he could convert to cash to get the fentanyl?
We can’t babysit addicts full time. If they can’t figure out how to keep from dying while indulging their addiction, there is nothing society can do for them.
If you want to defacto legalize drugs, this is what you get.
Maybe this will get their attention
“Fentanyl killing a lot more young folks than COVID ever did.”
Fentanyl is not killing these young folks. They are killing themselves. It’s pretty easy when they use Fentanyl, to be sure, but to deflect blame onto anyone but the individual user is make believe.
Throw the book at the dealer, but don’t pretend he wasn’t selling illegally to a buyer buying illegally.
The tragedy occurred when this person started using, not so much when they inevitably overdosed.
‘“In cases such as this, where murder is alleged, we believe we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt the dealer knowingly understood the dangers of fentanyl, and still chose profits over human life when supplying drugs to the victim,” District Attorney Jason Anderson said in a news release Monday.’
If they charged first degree murder (the article doesn’t seem clear on this), then they are going to have to prove more than that the dealer knew the dangers of fentanyl. They are going to have to prove malice and premeditation, specifically towards the person who died. That’s a very large burden of proof they seem to be tiptoeing around in their press release.
“Fentanyl is camouflaged as another not deadly drug or eve candy. It would be like disguising a hand grenade as a child’s toy.”
We already have statutes specifically covering that type of thing, and those statues aren’t “homicide”.
I know people want to see these people punished, but overcharging them with a crime that you can’t get a conviction for is not likely to bring the result you are hoping for.
“Well if you knowingly sell or lend a firearm to someone you know is disqualified by a felony, mental illness, drug use, etc. you are liable.”
“Liable” means you have civil liability. Not that you can be charged with homicide.
“Providing a known deadly controlled substance, probably of unnown strenghth, illegally to a user resulting in their all too predictable death is considered murder.”
If that were true, then every heroin dealer whose customers overdosed could be charged with murder. Surely you can cite a few dozen of such cases, since they must be happening everywhere?
well unless he ( the alledged dealer) shoved the stuff down the users throat, it was a bad choice on the users part. Not a murder.
So you give a pass to the Mexican cartels and Chicoms? Not me.
Eh ???
In the rural VA county where I reside, someone known to me was charged with murder for providing morphine to a mother and daughter who both managed to od on it and die. The morphine was taken by a helpful neighbor of a woman who died of cancer. The taker enlisted the moron I know to physically take the morphine about 50 feet to the buyer’s apartment. There was no evidence he was making money from it but who knows. He served at least 2 years for merely carrying the package to the recipient.
Heroin is an illegal street drug, not used for medical purposes that I know of. Fentanyl is a controlled substance used legally in medicine for anesthesia and pain control.
I’m not going to research this for you, but yes, heroin dealers are sometimes prosecuted for selling drugs that lead to fatalities. I suspect that police normally don’t care a lot about the sort of people who do the od’ing, and tieing the supplier to the user takes effort.
Famous people tend to get different treatment. “Catherine Evelyn Smith was a Canadian occasional backup singer, rock groupie, drug dealer, and legal secretary, served 15 months in the California state prison system for injecting original Saturday Night Live cast member John Belushi with a fatal dose of heroin and cocaine in 1982.” In the FR thread, the victim was an 18 year old girl; her parents or someone with influence chose to make issue of it.
“In the rural VA county where I reside, someone known to me was charged with murder for providing morphine to a mother and daughter who both managed to od on it and die.... He served at least 2 years for merely carrying the package to the recipient.”
2 years doesn’t sound like a “murder” conviction to me. Do you mean negligent homicide or something like that?
“I’m not going to research this for you, but yes, heroin dealers are sometimes prosecuted for selling drugs that lead to fatalities.”
Of course they are prosecuted, but they’re not prosecuted for murder. As for the Belushi case, that woman pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter, not murder.
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