State and federal prosecutors responded to fentanyl overdoses by treating accidents as homicides.
Eight years ago, Scott Hancock, then 28, helped a 19-year-old acquaintance known in court papers as T.G. obtain fentanyl. At her request, Hancock reached out to his own drug dealer, who supplied five fentanyl capsules that Hancock handed to T.G. in exchange for twenty dollars. Hancock then gave the money to the dealer. Because T.G. later died from an overdose, Hancock is serving a twenty-year term in a federal prison in Illinois.
That punishment is the result of the mandatory minimum established by 21 U.S.C. 241, which imposes penalties for drug distribution that results in death. Although that statute has existed since 1986, the sharp rise in fentanyl-related fatalities over the past decade spurred a surge in federal drug prosecutions tied to overdoses, a rise of about 44 percent from fiscal year 2019 to 2023. Hancock’s case exemplified that trend and prompted his mother, G.D. Hancock, a retired finance professor, to investigate the matter. Her inquiry produced a database that illuminates what happens when the government treats accidental fatalities as if they were intentional homicides.
To date, Hancock has cataloged 2,930 sentences in such cases dating back to 2010. The tally includes 1,399 federal cases and 1,531 state cases, which rely on either statutes that target drug-induced deaths or on broader laws addressing felony murder, “depraved heart” murder, or manslaughter.
At the federal level, sentences of twenty years or more were relatively common, making up 37 percent of the cases, compared with 13 percent at the state level. The overwhelming majority of the cases—about 84 percent—were resolved through plea agreements. That outcome aligns with expectations given the high stakes of trial. Among defendants who pleaded guilty, the median sentence was about nine years, whereas those who pressed the government to prove its case typically faced about twenty years.
Hancock’s record of cases relies on multiple sources, including news reports, court filings, announcements from state and federal prosecutors, her own collection of case files and research, and submissions from families, lawyers, and researchers. In addition, researchers at Northeastern University maintain a separate database drawn from news reports that covers 3,264 cases of drug-induced homicide from 2011 through 2022.
Supporters of such prosecutions often defend them as a means to deter or punish those involved in drug distribution when a death occurs. Critics contend the practice is morally indefensible. It punishes individuals who voluntarily used drugs as if they were helpless prey capturable by criminal networks, a stance that resembles the argument that bartenders or liquor store owners should bear responsibility whenever someone succumbs to alcohol poisoning or the long-term effects of heavy drinking. The key difference, many note, is the legal status of the substance; prohibition creates a black market in which drug composition is highly variable and unpredictable, adding danger.
The notion of charging someone with homicide based on an accidental overdose extends even to people who were not drug manufacturers or large-scale traffickers. A significant portion of the cases involve defendants whose “trafficking” was merely sharing drugs with a relative, a romantic partner, a friend, or an acquaintance. Based on the information G.D. Hancock gathered, she counts 241 cases in which the person who died from an overdose was a friend, partner, or relative of the defendant, with other sources suggesting that such prosecutions are widespread.
Researchers from Northeastern University looked at a sample of 213 online news reports from 2000 to 2017 and found that half of those charged with drug-induced homicide were caretakers, family members, friends, or partners of the deceased.
In 2021, the Pittsburgh-based Tribune-Review examined Pennsylvania’s prosecutions for “drug delivery resulting in death” (DDRD) and highlighted a case involving a Westmoreland County man who died from an overdose of drugs obtained from a friend of a friend of a friend. Although the drugs ultimately originated with a man named “Bee” in Penn Hills, the article noted that the three intermediaries between the victim and Bee were all charged with DDRD, a first-degree felony carrying up to forty years in prison.
The Tribune-Review also reported several other DDRD defendants, including a Delmont woman who called paramedics after finding her boyfriend unresponsive in their bathroom, two friends who bought heroin for a man who overdosed at a Taco Bell, and a Monessen woman who sent her cousin to purchase a brick of heroin and who sold five stamped bags to a friend, who then sold four bags to a man from Elizabeth Borough who died of a fatal overdose.
The same newspaper found that many DDRD defendants were relatively low-level dealers. Jonathan Fodi, a defense attorney and former prosecutor, told the paper he and his colleagues had not encountered a DDRD case involving a high-level dealer. Because the state must connect the defendant to the person who died, such cases are not surprising; however, this dynamic compounds the perceived injustice of treating these deaths as homicides since many low-level dealers do not know precisely what is in the drugs they sell.
A 2002 analysis in the New Jersey Law Journal of 32 drug-induced homicide prosecutions determined that 25 involved prosecutions of friends of the decedent who did not engage in significant drug sales themselves. A 2017 report by a Wisconsin television station reviewing the 100 most recent drug-induced homicide prosecutions in that state stated that nearly 90 percent of those charged were friends or relatives of the deceased, or the lowest rungs of the drug supply chain. A Chicago Tribune examination of drug-induced homicide cases filed between 2011 and 2014 found that the defendant was typically the last person with the person who overdosed.
Even advocates of strong drug-control policies ought to recognize the injustice of incarcerating individuals for ten or twenty years for roles that were tangential to a death they neither caused nor intended. Moreover, far from reducing the incidence of such deaths, this approach can impede life-saving emergency interventions by deterring bystanders from seeking help. That chilling effect undermines Good Samaritan laws intended to protect 911 callers from criminal charges in such scenarios.
The stated justification for these prosecutions often appears disconnected from the realities of the cases. In a 2023 press release, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) noted that “deaths from illicit drugs, especially fentanyl, are at historic highs.” The agency explained that its mission is to “protect Americans and save lives by pursuing those responsible,” and it pledged to ensure that as many drug traffickers involved in those deaths as possible are brought before a judge.
As an illustrative example of that strategy, the DEA pointed to Scott Hancock’s case, labeling him a “trafficker” who was “found guilty of providing the drugs that killed a 19-year-old woman in 2018.” Given the specifics of that transaction, the logic behind the conclusion that sending such a person to prison for two decades would “save lives” is difficult to discern.
