NORTHAMPTON — A former University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate student convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the overdose death of a fellow student is appealing his case to the state’s highest court.
Jesse Carrillo was getting his master’s degree at UMass Amherst in 2013 when, on Oct. 1 of that year, he purchased heroin from a New York dealer for himself and 20-year-old undergraduate student Eric Sinacori. Two nights later, Carrillo again drove to the Bronx and purchased heroin from the same dealer for himself and Sinacori, who was found dead the next day of an overdose.
Carrillo was indicted in 2015 on involuntary manslaughter and heroin distribution charges. A jury found him guilty of those charges in 2017, and Hampshire Superior Court Judge John Agostini sentenced him to a year in jail and five years probation. In November 2017, the state’s appeals court affirmed Agostini’s ruling to deny Carrillo a stay of sentence.
But Carrillo’s lawyers have appealed the case to the Supreme Judicial Court, or SJC, which is scheduled to hear oral arguments on Feb. 4.
“I’m asking the SJC to recognize that there is a difference between a drug addict who pools his money with another person to purchase heroin and a drug dealer who supplies heroin for a profit,” Carrillo’s Boston attorney, J.W. Carney Jr., said Wednesday.
Carrillo’s lawyers are arguing that Agostini should have instructed the jury to consider the lesser offense of possession of heroin instead of felony distribution, given that Carrillo bought the drugs for his and Sinacori’s personal use as a “joint venture.”
“Under the law, if the evidence supports a lesser charge then the court must instruct on it,” Carney said.
By not offering the jury the lesser offense of possession, jurors were faced with simply deciding whether Carrillo was guilty or not guilty of distribution, he said.
“Since there was no contest at the trial that Jesse had obtained the heroin for his use and for Eric’s use, it likely forced the jury into the conviction of distribution,” Carney said.
In a brief to the SJC, Carrillo’s attorneys also contend that the trial court erred by allowing the involuntary manslaughter charge to go to the jury.
“The mere provision of heroin, without more, does not constitute wanton or reckless conduct beyond a reasonable doubt,” the brief reads. “To hold otherwise would be to create a per se recklessness rule for the provision of heroin — such a determination is outside the province of the judiciary and should be left to the Legislature.”
Carney pointed to expert testimony during Carrillo’s trial from Sarah Wakeman — director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s substance use disorder initiative and a member of the governor’s opioid working group — that heroin addicts frequently obtain heroin for each other.
“That fact alone can not constitute reckless conduct, which a person would know could lead to a death,” Carney said.
The state’s brief, filed by Northwestern Assistant District Attorney Cynthia Von Flatern, argues that Agostini ruled correctly that Carrillo was not entitled to a lesser offense of heroin possession because the evidence “could not establish that the defendant and the victim acquired heroin together at the same time.”
“The victim was not present and did not have constructive possession of the heroin that the defendant acquired,” Von Flatern’s brief reads. “Instead, the evidence showed that the defendant served as a link in the chain of distribution between a larger heroin dealer and the victim.”
As for the involuntary manslaughter charge, Von Flatern wrote that Carrillo’s delivery of nine bags of heroin to Sinacori should be considered “wanton and reckless” conduct.
Von Flatern argued that Carrillo was well aware of Sinacori’s desperation to get the drugs — he had texted Carrillo that his “veins were screaming,” she wrote — and that it was “foreseeable” that Sinacori would inject “as many as the nine bags the defendant delivered.” Carrillo sent two texts to Sinacori after delivering the heroin, but did not follow up after receiving no response, Von Flatern noted.
Sinacori had worked as a confidential informant for UMass police after they had caught him selling LSD and molly almost a year prior to his death. The deal the police struck with Sinacori meant that his parents did not learn of his arrest, and police even gave him back $700 they had seized from his room.
Those facts were revealed in a Boston Globe story written by two UMass Amherst students, Eric Bosco and Kayla Marchetti, in September 2014. UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy suspended the UMass Police Department’s confidential student informant program that month, and then in January of 2015 ended the program, saying it was “fundamentally inconsistent with the core values of our community.”
The case comes as prosecutors across the country are increasingly bringing charges against people who sold drugs that led to an accidental overdose death. A 2017 report from the Drug Policy Alliance — an organization seeking to end the so-called “War on Drugs” — found that while data is unavailable on how many people face such prosecutions, there was a 300-percent increase in news stories about defendants facing prosecution under drug-induced homicide laws from 2011 to 2016.
Some states that do not have drug-induced homicide laws on the books “still charge the offense of drug delivery resulting in death under various felony-murder, depraved heart, or involuntary or voluntary manslaughter laws,” the report found.
Proponents of those types of prosecutions argue that they serve as an effective deterrent to drug selling and drug use. Gov. Charlie Baker introduced a bill in the Legislature last year that would have created a new manslaughter charge for “those who cause death by illegally selling drugs,” as he put it in a letter to lawmakers.
“When illegal drug distribution causes a death, laws that were designed to punish the act are inadequate to recognize the seriousness of the resulting harm,” Baker wrote in the letter.
The law would have created a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for those convicted, but the bill never made it out of committee.
As overdose deaths continue to rise, however, groups like the Drug Policy Alliance argue that these kinds of prosecutions are excessively punitive, and that there is no evidence that they reduce overdose fatalities.
“Drug war proponents have been repeating the deterrence mantra for over 40 years, and yet drugs are cheaper, stronger, and more widely available than at any other time in US history,” reads the report from the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors harm-reduction approaches to drug addiction.
The state’s SJC will be accepting opinions from parties not directly involved in Carrillo’s case — known as “friend of the court” or amicus briefs — ahead of arguments on Feb. 4. Justices generally issue their written opinions within 130 days following oral arguments.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.