I’ve never thought the felony murder doctrine was good policy, particularly if you’re going to administer the death penalty. If the state’s going to kill someone, the least we could do is make sure the person actually said out to commit a murder. Doubly so when the doctrine is used by drug warrior prosecutors. Tripply so when we live with lawmakers whose reaction to every bit of troubling news is to pass a law creating new felonies.

Felony murder is how folks like Dr. Frank Fisher can be charged with murder for prescribing drugs to patients who then sell them on the black market to buyers who then take them for reasons other than why they were prescribed, overdose, and die. Here’s another example:

Last spring, 48-year-old Elfreida Cook, diagnosed with colon cancer and awaiting surgery, was using a powerful prescription pain killer, a fentanyl patch, which, once it is applied to the skin, slowly delivers, over the course of three days, a medicine that can be 100 times more potent than morphine.

[...]

About two weeks later, on the morning of April 23, Wayne Snyder, a 33-year-old man who grew up just a few houses away from the Cooks in Bradford, was found dead on the living room floor of his downtown Westerly apartment.

According to police, he was the victim of an overdose from one of Cook’s fentanyl patches, which they say she sold either directly to him, or to a friend of his, the night before he died.

Three days later, Elfreida Cook was charged under drug statutes with the illegal delivery of the prescription drug fentanyl. Last month, after an autopsy on Snyder was finished, she was charged with murder.

Let’s assume all of these facts or correct. Does Cook really deserve to be charged with murder? Of course, that’s not even the whole story. As it turns out, Cook had noticed several of her patches missing, and reported their absence to the police.

When some of the patches disappeared from her home on Bowling Lane, one side of a decrepit duplex in the old mill village of Bradford, on the rural outskirts of Westerly, she went downtown to the police station to report them stolen, according to her niece, Derlyn Scott.

“I drove her there,” says Derlyn Scott, 37, who was raised by Elfreida Cook in the house on Bowling Lane. “She needed those patches. The police did nothing.”

[...]

Cook’s family, dismayed over the seriousness of the charge, and her failing health — she also has diabetes, asthma and heart problems — contend that the person who took the patches from her, weeks before Snyder’s death, has continued to brag about it in the neighborhood.

But Westerly Police Capt. Lauren Matarese, while acknowledging Cook did at one time report to police that patches had been stolen, says Cook also admitted to selling one the night Snyder died.

Worse, it looks like the murder charge is more about “sending an important message” on the latest drug hysteria — fentanyl patches — than on achieving justice for Cook.

Cook’s prosecution on a murder charge, which has a maximum sentence of life in prison, is based on a seldom-used provision of the state statute, one sometimes criticized by legal scholars, that specifically cites instances in which a death occurs from the illegal sale or delivery of a controlled drug.

“We advised Westerly that we believed that the Rhode Island homicide statute provides the kind of latitude that they would need to charge her with murder,” says Michael Healey, a spokesman for Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch.

“It was admittedly a charging decision that was out of the ordinary. That said, though, the fact pattern is increasing, not only locally but nationally,” Healey says. “We see more and more cases like this … drugs making their way to other people and bad things happening. We believe the murder homicide statute supports this.”

In other words, they decided to make an example of her. I haven’t yet read the reports on fenatyl patch abuse, but if I had to wager, I’d guess they’re about as legit as the Oxy, ecstasy, huffing, insert-your-new-heroin-of-choice-here stories.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 at 7:41 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.