Montco Among State Leaders In Charging Drug Dealers With Homicide

NORRISTOWN, PA — Montgomery County is among the state leaders in filing the drug delivery resulting in death charge, according to court data, holding dealers liable for homicide in cases of fatal overdoses.

A total of 3.44 percent of all criminal charges in Montgomery County from 2015 to 2019 were reserved for dealers who sold to victims who later had a fatal overdose. Only a handful of counties have a higher percentage of those cases; Montgomery has the 9th highest rate statewide.

The numbers are likely a function of two things, both the District Attorney's Office's stated aggressiveness in pursuing this judicial tactic, as well as the prevalance of opioids and drug networks in the greater Philadelphia area.

In Montgomery County specifically, the number of cases has risen notably: from 0 in 2015, to 3 in 2016, 11 in 2017, 3 in 2018, and 13 in 2019, according to data from the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.

"In the last two years, our team of detectives and local law enforcement have investigated all of our overdose deaths as potential homicides to see if they can determine who is responsible for causing the overdose death," DA Kevin Steele said following a series of arrests on the charge in the county last year. "We are sending a loud and clear message to those who traffic in this poison that if we can prove that the drugs you sold caused someone's death, you will be charged with homicide."

Montgomery County is not alone. District Attorneys and law enforcement organizations around the Commonwealth strongly back the measure. In southeastern Pennsyvlania, Chester(5.63 percent) and Bucks (4.13 percent) have even higher rates of filing the charge than Montgomery. And all pale to the heart of the epidemic in Lancaster and York counties, which are both at 11 percent.

In Pennsylvania, the charge carries with it a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison.

Treating dealers as murderers has drawn criticism from some, specifically law analysts and policymakers who find the charge ineffective and unnecessarily punitive.

"Prosecutors and legislators who champion renewed drug induced homicide enforcement couch the use of this punitive measure, either naively or disingenuously, as necessary to curb increasing rates of drug overdose deaths," a 2017 report from the Drug Policy Alliance argues. "But there is not a shred of evidence that these laws are effective at reducing overdose fatalities."

Specifically, the Alliance says that such "drug war" policies nationwide disproportionately target Black and Latino communities, increase the stigma surrounding drug use and mental health care, and make it more difficult for community health initiatives to penetrate at-risk communities.

Statewide, the charges increased in frequency by 356 percent between 2015 and 2019.

Nationally, Pennsylvania's state guidelines are roughly average when it comes to the leeway prosecutors are given to use this charge. According to an analysis in published in 2019 in the Penn State Law Review, Pennsylvania "falls somewhere in the middle between other state statutes ranging from embracing leniency to imposing strict liability."