Ronald Dye pressured his brother-in-law into trying heroin to ease his pain — injecting his arm with the deadly drug.
Coreon Snow-Veley sold heroin to a young man — heroin that happened to be laced with fentanyl.
Both men were convicted in Lucas County Common Pleas Court of involuntary manslaughter for causing another to overdose and die — two of a dozen such cases that a Lucas County grand jury has indicted since 2014.
While in years past those deaths likely would have been filed away as accidents, recently county prosecutors across Ohio have been going after the people who they can prove are responsible for killing another person with drugs.
Federal prosecutors also have stepped up such prosecutions, particularly when the suspect is a large-scale dealer. Federal law allows for more severe penalties, including mandatory minimum prison terms of 20 years, and, for good reason, said Justin E. Herdman, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, which includes Toledo.
“These people know exactly what they're doing. They know what they're selling. They might as well be selling arsenic to people,” Mr. Herdman said, adding, “When you sell it and somebody dies as a result of it, there's got to be a penalty.”
In 2013, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine began encouraging county prosecutors to pursue involuntary manslaughter charges for overdose deaths as one more way law enforcement could attempt to rein in the burgeoning heroin epidemic.
“Every case is unique, but I think most people would agree that in certain situations you can stop additional deaths from happening by treating these deaths as homicides where it is appropriate to do so, and where it is appropriate to hold accountable those who dispense, manufacture, and supply these drugs that can kill,” said Matthew Donahue, chief of the special prosecutions section of the Attorney General’s Office.
Jennifer Liptack-Wilson, an assistant Lucas County prosecutor who is assigned to the Toledo Heroin Overdose Task Force, said the goal is taking down drug dealers.
“The goal is to make it as far up the chain as we can so if we can keep tracing the source of the drug higher up the food chain, we will,” Ms. Liptack-Wilson said. “Generally we have been successful tracing it to the immediate dealer.”
In cases when the drug dealer cannot be identified, friends and co-users of the deceased have been charged with corrupting another with drugs — for sharing the heroin, obstructing justice for getting rid of cell phones or other evidence that might lead police to the dealer — or permitting drug abuse, for allowing drug activity in a home.
Wood County has had a number of those cases and, in one instance, charged and convicted a man for reckless homicide for the overdose death of his own wife.
Wood County Prosecutor Paul Dobson said his office will continue to punish those whose conduct leads to drug deaths.
“The real goal is to find and prosecute drug dealers,” Mr. Dobson said. “Otherwise, when it's someone who is more peripheral or a co-user, we look very closely to try and figure out if that person engaged in any additional conduct that made them more culpable than somebody just being there.”
Lucas County has pursued a dozen of the cases since 2014, four of which are currently pending in court. Snow-Veley’s was the first case to go to trial. He was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and trafficking in heroin — a conviction that was upheld by Ohio’s 6th District Court of Appeals.
Defense attorney Ronnie Wingate recently represented a man charged with selling the heroin that caused a man to overdose and, while the victim survived, he suffered permanent brain damage. Mr. Wingate's client, Edmund Ridley, was found guilty of corrupting another with drugs, aggravated trafficking, and aggravated possession of drugs. He was sentenced to nearly 11 years in prison.
Mr. Wingate said the cases are troubling because the law places strict liability — complete responsibility — on the defendant to know what he is selling when in fact what he thinks is heroin could be laced with fentanyl and other deadly drugs.
“In Mr. Ridley’s trial, one detective made the statement that the drug dealers, the street merchants, that are selling this stuff have no idea what it is and what it has been cut with,” Mr. Wingate said. “They just get it. They just sell in the effort of making money. It’s nothing personal. It’s just money. And the law, as it is, places a certain responsibility or duty on that person that’s dealing the drug to know what it is he is selling.”
Mr. Wingate said drug users who overdose and die often have more than one drug in their system.
“You don’t know whether it was the heroin that was sold to him, the cocaine that was also in his system, or any other illegal substance or prescribed medication in his system,” Mr. Wingate said. “You have that cocktail that is in his system and whatever happens you can’t single out that it was the individual act of this person selling an illegal substance that caused the overdose or the death when in fact you have more than one illegal substance in the body of that person.”
In a recent decision out of Ohio’s 5th District Court of Appeals, a Licking County man’s conviction for involuntary manslaughter was overturned after the appellate court concluded that the victim had both heroin and cocaine in his system when he died and experts could not say whether it was only the heroin that killed him.
The attorney general’s office regularly trains police, coroners, and prosecutors on how to investigate overdose deaths, beginning with thorough crime scene examinations. Mr. Donahue said prosecutors have to consider each case and its particular circumstances before pursuing manslaughter charges.
The state does not keep track of how many cases have been prosecuted in the past five years, he said, and it’s difficult to measure the impact.
“The difficult thing is, how do you judge if something didn’t happen?” he asked. “I often liken it to drunken driving arrests and aggravated vehicular homicide prosecutions. Years ago, we got very serious about it, and it’s gone down over the years.
“The sense is it is helping,” Mr. Donahue added. “With the opioid crisis, there’s not a silver bullet. There’s probably a bunch of silver pellet shells, and I think everyone wants to use every tool that is available to collectively get us out of where we are.”
Contact Jennifer Feehan at jfeehan@theblade.com or 419-213-2134.
First Published September 4, 2018, 5:16 a.m.