A quick internet search reveals a slew of Tennesseans charged, especially in the past two years, with second-degree murder for selling fentanyl that results in a death.
Many of the cases are still pending, but the search revealed very few convictions. However, one of those came on Wednesday in Hamilton County.
A Criminal Court jury found mother-of-eight Morgan Nicole Copeland guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Nicholas Jackson in 2018. She faces sentencing of 16 to 60 years on May 2.
“To my knowledge,” District Attorney Coty Wamp said in a statement, “this is the first trial of its kind in Hamilton County. … My hope is that this conviction is a wake-up call for drug dealers all across our county.”
Tennessee legislators in 2018 passed a bill that allowed the second-degree murder charge when a death results from the purchased or distributed fentanyl.
“When considering an overdose death,” Wamp’s statement continued, “the community may not typically think of a Second Degree Murder charge. However, the legislative intent was very clear with this statute. In Tennessee, if you sell or deliver illegal drugs to a person and that person dies as a result of those drugs, you can be found guilty of murder.”
Copeland, according to trial testimony, sold fentanyl to Jackson under the guise of a different controlled substance, and it killed the victim immediately upon his taking it.
Dr. James Metcalfe, the Hamilton County medical examiner, said the victim had a fentanyl level of more than twice a fatal dose.
Copeland, whose husband testified she was in Hawkins County on the day Jackson died, told detectives in an interview at the Hawkins County jail that she “sold meth,” not the fentanyl-laced heroin, and “did not meet” Jackson.
“I’m off drugs,” she said in the interview. “I’m a good kid.”
The jury evidently thought differently and provided a conviction.
Unfortunately, as with many cases, drug and otherwise, charges are often pleaded down.
In January in Greene County, a woman charged in a similar case to Copeland’s pleaded guilty to one count of reckless homicide in connection with the fentanyl-related death of a man in 2021. She was sentenced to an 11-year prison term but will only spend a year in jail, followed by the remainder of the time on probation.
Last month, in an Court of Criminal Appeals interlocutory opinion about a Marion County case in which a man is charged with second-degree murder through the delivery of fentanyl, Judge Tom Greenholtz, the former Hamilton County Criminal Court judge, wrote that the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knew the substance being unlawfully distributed was fentanyl. The state had said it had, but the court said it had not and remanded the case for further proceedings.
In 2022 in DeKalb County, a man who had been charged with second-degree murder and the sale and distribution of fentanyl in the 2020 death of a Smithville woman, pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years, of which he must serve at least 30% of his time.
Before the latter trial, District 13 Attorney General Bryant Dunaway discussed the perils of such a prosecution.
“It is a difficult case to prove,” he said. “Tying the deliverer of the drugs to the death is the hard part. It’s an enormous challenge.”
In other words, second-degree murder convictions for fentanyl-related deaths are no slam dunk. But Wamp’s office will have other opportunities. The 2022 arrests of 14 people over nine overdose deaths going back as far as 2020, for instance, should provide several.
Among the 14, seven were charged with second-degree murder.
Overdose deaths have risen more than 70% over the past five years in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, according to a 2022 report by the American Addiction Centers Oxford Treatment Center.
In Tennessee, fentanyl went from being the cause of one out of six overdose deaths in 2015 to four out of six in 2020.
Nevertheless, critics aren’t convinced the second-degree murder/fentanyl tie-in is a panacea. They say that many of those charged struggle with addictions themselves and that prison rather than a treatment center is the wrong place for them; that charging the seller/distributor doesn’t bring down the high-level traffickers; and that suppliers who are friends with the victim may hesitate to call for help after an overdose because they’re worried about the second-degree murder charges they might face.
Because fentanyl has become such a deadly scourge, though, we think the stiffer prosecutions and murder convictions — when they can be achieved, as Wamp’s staff did — will be a deterrent, especially as they increase with the number of people charged. This under-the-radar killer must be stopped.