Fentanyl-death homicide bill nixed by legislators
Prosecutor says issue still before top court
A bill to make sales of a synthetic opioid that precede an overdose death a murder offense has met its own demise in Annapolis, where a legislative committee voted not to forward the proposal to the full General Assembly.
A state senator from St. Mary’s sponsored the bill, backed at a hearing by testimony from the county’s state’s attorney, whose repeated attempts last year to convict defendants of second-degree murder in overdose investigations led instead to convictions
on, or guilty pleas to, lesser charges.
Sen. Jack Bailey (R-St. Mary’s, Calvert) submitted the bill, in part reading that a second-degree murder conviction would follow a fentanyl distribution if it was “a contributing cause of the death of another,” and it was assigned to the senate’s judicial proceedings committee, which held a vote on the bill last week.
“It did not get a favorable report from the committee,” Alicia Luckhardt, Bailey’s chief of staff, said Monday.
Neither the committee’s chair nor vice chair, joining the majority in a 7-to4 split to make an “unfavorable” finding, responded to requests to their offices for an explanation of why the bill fell short of the support it needed.
St. Mary’s State’s Attorney Richard Fritz (R) said Tuesday that he heard that one or more of the members on the committee wanted a “more expansive piece of legislation,” including other drugs.
Fritz’s prosecution of defendants from overdose deaths halted after a judge dismissed one case in its entirety, following a ruling by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals that, in an Eastern Shore case involving heroin, 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.
Even if the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, reverses that decision in the Eastern Shore case, Fritz said the decision might not resolve the issue of an autopsy that finds fentanyl among multiple drugs in the victim’s body, but does not conclude which drug caused the death.
The top court’s opinion might not address the element of fentanyl being a “contributing factor” in a death, the prosecutor said, along with the “issue[s] of connectivity and foreseeability” of a drug sale killing someone.
Bailey’s bill addressed that concern, the prosecutor said, with its language applying the murder charge against a drug distributor who can “reasonably foresee” that his actions might result in a person’s death.
“It’s upsetting, obviously,” Fritz said of the bill’s defeat in the committee, and he noted that 27 states already have overdose-homicide laws on the books, with one now working its way toward the governor’s desk in Virginia.
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 confirmed on Tuesday, following 30 overdose deaths in the county in 2018.
“There are so many Marylanders that are getting killed by fentanyl,” Fritz said, adding that the legislative proposal likely will be resubmitted in 2020.
“Next year,” he said, “we’ll try again.”