The proliferation of manslaughter charges against drug traffickers has revealed the extent to which overdose mortality has been mobilized by law enforcement, prosecutors and the judiciary in the pursuit of these charges. The opioid crisis has also been used to justify a shift in sentencing policy particularly in cases of organized crime. Yet the majority of people who face manslaughter charges are drug users themselves engaged in the lowest tiers of the drug trade.

1. Introduction

In a post to On The Wire dated March 30, 2019, titled Fentanyl Trafficking in Alberta, I reviewed statistics emerging from the opioid crisis and early developments in the courts as the justice system responded to the dramatic rise in fentanyl trafficking cases. (here) It was apparent that, at the time, the Canadian judiciary was moving toward a guideline sentence for fentanyl trafficking and I asked: What’s next?  A test case of manslaughter?  I concluded the piece with a reference to the prosecution of Carlique DeBerry in the United States District Court for the Western District of New York at Buffalo. On February 6, 2019, Mr. DeBarry was convicted of distributing fentanyl causing death and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. Now, over five years later, it is a good time for an update on recent developments.

2. In Canadian Courts

On May 22, 2025, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s national broadcaster, briefly reported on fentanyl deaths that resulted in manslaughter charges and found “an evolution in sentences ranging from 18 months to 10 years.” (here) The reference to the range of sentence followed an article on Logan Beckett of London, Ontario, who was charged with manslaughter for allegedly selling an undisclosed drug to a 17 year old boy who died from an overdose. On August 26, 2025, journalist Joshua Freeman reported that York Regional Police charged Jafari Roudsan, an alleged drug dealer, with manslaughter arising from the overdose death of a Vaughan, Ontario, man. (here) And on August 27, 2025, CBC News reported that Justice Michael Cozens of the Yukon Territorial Court sentenced Jared Skookum, an indigenous man, to two-years-less-a-day for manslaughter. Mr. Skookum, who pleaded guilty, sold drugs to Stephanie Pye who was later found dead in a Whitehorse hotel room from a fentanyl overdose. (here)

In an article titled Should fentanyl dealers be charged with manslaughter for fatal overdoses published in the March 7, 2025, edition of Canadian Affairs, Toronto-based reporter Alexandra Keeler said “at least 50,000 Canadians have died from drug overdoses since 2016.” (here) In 2024, an average of 24 people died daily from drug overdoses with fentanyl accounting for nearly 80 percent of the deaths. There is no question that manslaughter charges in drug mortality cases have been on the rise in Canada. In a study titled Prosecuting Overdose: Manslaughter Charges Against People Who Use, Share, and Sell Drugs in Canada published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society in 2024, it was found that the number of manslaughter charges laid in drug-related death cases ballooned from three cases in 2016 to 135 in 2021. (here) The study asserted that, “[m]essaging by police, prosecutors and the courts mobilize the overdose crisis as rationale for these charges and prosecutions, positioning them as a form of redress to impacted communities.”

3. In American Courts

On January 23, 2025, James Watson pleaded guilty to charges of manslaughter and drug dealing in New Castle County Superior Court in Wilmington, Delaware, in the first successful use of a homicide charge against a fentanyl dealer in that state. (here) On June 10, 2025, Mr. Watson was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment followed by descending levels of probation. (here) On July 18, 2025, Santa Clara County prosecutors in San Jose, California, charged alleged drug dealer, Philip Ortega, with murder in the death of an infant who had consumed fentanyl. (here) And on August 1, 2025, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, announced the unsealing of an indictment charging a Bronx man, Estherlyn Frias, with “conspiracy to distribute narcotics resulting in death” in connection with the overdose death of an unidentified victim in Greenwich, Connecticut. The charge carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years and a maximum of life imprisonment. (here and here)

On May 16, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration, announced the filing of twenty criminal cases in 2025 targeting fentanyl dealers. (here) The DEA made the announcement against the backdrop of “an estimated 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2024”. Most of the deaths were fentanyl related. The estimate of drug overdose deaths was published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study, Prosecuting Overdose, found that research on cases of overdose-related manslaughter in the United States, generally referred to as “drug-induced homicide”, is more entrenched and long standing than Canadian scholarship. Some U.S. jurisdictions employ specific “drug delivery resulting in death” charges, unlike Canadian jurisdictions that use more general homicide and related provisions of the Criminal Code.

4. Sentence Range in Fentanyl Cases

The Prosecuting Overdose study found that “[o]verdose mortality has become routinely cited in legal rulings as a premise for harsher punishment”. The conclusion is supported by a review of three leading cases. In R v Smith, a 2017 opinion of the British Columbia Court of Appeal, Justice David Harris, writing for the majority, cited “the continuing escalation in the number of fentanyl-detected deaths” and “the enormity of the total numbers of accidental overdosing” as justification to increase the range of sentence for street level trafficking in fentanyl from 6 to 12 months to 18 to 36 months imprisonment. (here) In R v Felix, a 2019 precedent-setting opinion of the Alberta Court of Appeal, a guideline sentence of 9 years imprisonment was fixed for “wholesale” fentanyl trafficking. Writing for the five member unanimous panel, Justice Jolaine Antonio cited the increase in “fentanyl related deaths” as justification for the new “starting point” sentence. (here)

In R v Parranto, a 2021 split decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, Justice Michael Moldaver, in a concurring majority opinion, said the time had come “for our perception of the gravity of largescale trafficking in fentanyl to accord with the gravity of the crisis it has caused.” (here) In particular, he cited the rise in deaths during the opioid “epidemic” as justification for trial judges to consider life imprisonment for “directing minds of largescale fentanyl operations”. Justices Russell Brown and Sheilah Martin, writing for the more restrained four member majority, held that an offender’s “willingness to exploit at-risk populations” demonstrating a “reckless disregard for human life” is an aggravating factor in sentencing.

5. Conclusion

The dominant principle of sentencing in drug cases in Canadian penal law is deterrence. Although the increase in range of sentences in fentanyl cases in the last ten years is most striking in wholesale trafficking operations, there has nonetheless been a increase in low end cases. The fundamentals of the philosophy of deterrence do not distinguish between a two gram deal on the street and a two kilogram deal in a motel room. I will leave you, then, by returning to the Prosecuting Overdose study. The majority of drug dealers facing manslaughter charges are engaged in the lowest tiers of the drug trade and are, themselves, drug users. They are often intimately known by the deceased. These findings of the study correspond with the social profile of those who are the targets of drug-induced homicide prosecutions in the United States. The pursuit of these cases, the study concluded, “instantiates a clear delineation between people who use drugs and people who traffic drugs based on legal categories that do not cohere with the lived experience and relational practices of people who are involved in the drug trade.”

So goes the war on drugs.