One morning in August, Toth responded to a call from an old brown brick apartment building north of Columbus. It resembled a two-story motel, with exterior staircases and iron railings. The referring detective told Toth that a woman and her boyfriend had fallen asleep together the previous night: “She wakes up this morning, about 8 a.m.—he’s fuckin’ dead.” The girlfriend was sitting outside with a neighbor, wearing a pink tie-dyed shirt, black leggings, and Nike slides. Toth, noticing that the woman had uncontrollable jitters, said, “Look at that leg.”

Upstairs, in Apartment H, the dead man lay face up at the foot of a mattress on the living-room floor. He was bare-chested, and wearing dungarees and dark socks. Foamy vomit had run from the left side of his mouth and down his face. The inside of his left forearm held needle marks.

The detectives looked around. The apartment was largely empty, but on a dresser they found a charred spoon, scales, baggies, and a razor blade. A heavy stick leaned beside the front door; in one corner was an aluminum bat. There was a deck of cards, a bunch of dice, and a scorecard pencilled with players’ names: Daddy, Baby. Baby was up by one.

Next to the body lay a pack of Marlboros and a purple lighter. A tiny photograph of a woman was taped to the pack. That’s how personal property is labelled in rehab, one of the detectives pointed out.

The woman in the photograph wasn’t the girlfriend—it was a neighbor, who was in jail. Toth put the girlfriend in the front seat of his unmarked police vehicle and asked for an explanation. Detective Chuck Clark, whose case it was, sat in the back, listening closely. The girlfriend told the investigators that whatever had killed her boyfriend must have come from elsewhere. She said, “I know he found something in that cigarette pack—I know it! I can feel it in my fucking soul!”

The detectives hadn’t found anything in the pack except cigarettes. Toth said, “You saw something in that cigarette pack.”

“I did not!”

“There! No more wobble.” Facebook

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Shopping Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen

The girlfriend claimed that she’d spent the night with her head on her boyfriend’s chest, which also seemed dubious: in many overdoses, loud “agonal” breathing precedes death. Another detective, listening at the car’s open window, finally murmured, “Code B,” which meant to arrest her.

Toth gave the woman one last chance. He said, “Your boyfriend is no longer here, and all we want to do is—”

“Figure out what happened,” she said.

Toth told her, “I think you know something.”

The woman, as if suddenly comprehending her precarious position, said, “Come with me.”

They all filed back into the apartment. In the bedroom, she reached into the closet and, sobbing, retrieved a baggie of beige powder from the overhead tracks of the sliding door.

She had made things better for herself by giving up the drugs, but worse by lying. The detective who wanted to arrest her told his colleagues, “I just don’t have the patience for that shit. She knew what fucking killed him.” (The man died of a combination of cocaine, fentanyl, and acetylfentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can be up to a hundred times more powerful than morphine; on the street, it’s known as Apache, Jackpot, and China White.)

At the very least, the detectives could charge the girlfriend with obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence. It was also within their purview to book her on involuntary manslaughter, and let the courts figure it out.

It fell to Clark whether or not to arrest the woman. Toth assured him that he’d back him whatever he decided. Clark thought for a moment, then said, “Personally, I don’t think she ought to be Code B’d.” With that, the woman escaped Jamie Maynard’s fate.

Not long ago, Jamie’s mom asked her, “Would you be alive right now if you had gotten off?” They were sitting in the family room of Frank and Debbie’s house one afternoon. Jamie thought for a minute and said, “Probably not.” She has now been sober for three years.

Whenever I visited the Bartons, Jamie’s parents always sat together quietly, on their sectional sofa, listening to their daughter describe her life. At one point, Debbie said, “I don’t understand the whole addiction thing, so then I get really mad.” Addiction, in her opinion, was “a choice.” Jamie told her mom, “It literally changes the chemicals in your brain.”

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, addiction is a complex brain disease—“a medical illness,” not a “moral failing.” Northeastern’s Action Lab notes that addiction “alters brain neurochemistry such that it compels a person to satisfy cravings despite recognized negative consequences.” In 2015, both Jamie and Courtney would have suffered “intolerable distress” at the prospect of being unable to use heroin; they were contending with a disease that had diabolically transformed their lives into what the NIDA calls “a landscape of cues and triggers, like a video-game environment cunningly designed to pose the greatest challenge to his or her willpower at every turn.”

A twisted distinction of overdose-homicide cases is that many defendants need the same mental-health and addiction treatments that are offered to survivors of an overdose. The laws purport to protect life, but they may actually increase fatalities: a witness to an overdose may be less likely to dial 911, for fear of being prosecuted. Most Good Samaritan laws, which provide immunity to people who call for help, don’t apply to overdose-homicide cases. According to the Northeastern study, the statutes “create a quandary for people calling 911: you (probably) won’t get in trouble if the person experiencing an accidental overdose event survives, but if death occurs, you’re calling the cops on yourself.”

While Jamie was in prison, her parents took care of her newborn daughter and her sons. (Timothy violated the terms of his parole, and is back in prison.) After she got out, she returned to living with them. She and Jeremy resumed their relationship. Three times a week, they attend an A.A. meeting together.

Even though Jamie is no longer incarcerated, her punishment, she discovered, has not ended. Her trafficking charge can eventually be expunged, but an F1—a first-degree felony—is for life. Barring a pardon or a special type of appeal, which she cannot afford, she will always be ineligible for certain housing and employment.

The state revoked her gaming license. Last August, desperate after months of looking for a job, she walked into a temp agency and told a supervisor the whole story. The agency found her a job as a janitor at a factory. Jamie got up at five-thirty every morning to mop floors and clean toilets. She was home by the time her kids got off the school bus. She took weekend and holiday shifts, for the overtime. In October, she received a promotion, to quality control, making $14.50 an hour. She would like a full-fledged job at the plant but has delayed applying, fearing that she’ll fail the company’s mandatory background check.

Jamie sometimes regrets not allowing her case to go to trial. She wonders if there shouldn’t be a less severe kind of criminal charge for defendants who are not high-level traffickers. She wonders, too, what a jury would have made of Courtney’s autopsy, which revealed that she died not strictly of a heroin overdose but, rather, of a toxic combination of heroin and alprazolam—Xanax. Other substances found in her bloodstream included the sedative lorazepam and the depression medication Trazodone.

In another case, in nearby Licking County, an appeals court recently overturned a conviction in a case involving a mixture of heroin and cocaine. And last year the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court struck down a conviction because prosecutors failed to prove that the defendant knew that the heroin he’d given a schoolmate would kill him. Because overdoses are often medically ambiguous, defendants might be wise to reject a plea offer and take their cases to trial. Leukel, the Florida attorney, told me, “The hammer of the criminal-justice system carries so much weight, people are accepting responsibility for things they shouldn’t be accepting responsibility for.”

If more prosecutors began losing such cases, they might stop making overdose-homicide charges against low-level offenders, especially people struggling with drug addiction themselves. This past December, the family of a Franklin County man who died after a friend gave him heroin asked the court not to impose a prison sentence. Such a punishment, they said, would be “the worst possible outcome.” The dead man’s sister told the judge, “It could easily have been the other way around.” ♦