The racial, political, and criminal-legal implications of drug-induced homicide laws

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Public Health

First Advisor

Gonsalves, Gregg

Abstract

Amidst popular perception that drug policy has shifted from past ”War on Drugs”-era philosophies to ”treatment over punishment” strategies, punitive approaches still abound. In particular, support for drug-induced homicide laws - laws which hold people criminally responsible for deaths linked to drugs that they distribute - has increased dramatically from 2010 to 2024. This increase manifests in both the passage of new laws and increased enforcement of existing ones. Many researchers are concerned that this trend may be less shaped by its perceived efficacy in deterring drug sale and more influenced by racially and ethnically biased beliefs about people who sell drugs. This support, in turn, could bias the charge filing behaviors of elected prosecutors hoping to gain electoral favor. This dissertation explores these hypotheses in three research articles. The first article uses a randomized vignette experiment to study whether exposure to Black or Latino suspects in drug-induced homicide-type scenarios may influence public support for a drug-induced homicide law. The second uses a latent class regression of the same experiment to investigate whether suspect race influences support for punitive and supportive policies targeted at people who sell drugs, people who use drugs, and pharmaceutical companies. The third article uses fixed effects panel regression to explore whether election cycle timing affects elected prosecutors’ drug-induced homicide charge filing rates, using Pennsylvania as a case study. Results suggest that support for drug-nduced homicide laws and endorsement of the belief that the laws are morally justified increases when respondents are shown a Latino suspect, but there is no evidence of an increase in belief that the law will deter drug sale. In this first study, there is no evidence of any outcome differences for respondents shown a Black suspect. However, latent class regression in the second study suggests that those shown both Black and Latino suspects are less likely to generally endorse the efficacy of help-oriented policies for people who sell drugs, and those shown a Black suspect were less likely to endorse increased pharmaceutical regulation and immigration enforcement as an effective strategy to combat the overdose crisis. Additionally, those shown Latino suspects were more likely to make policy preference distinctions between people who use drugs versus people who sell drugs. Finally, incumbent prosecutors running in subsequent elections showed increased filing rates of Pennsylvania’s Drug Delivery Resulting in Death charges in all years preceding the election, with statistical significance three years and one year before the election. This trend was especially well-established in counties whose vote margins favored Donald Trump in the 2016 election, as well as counties in the top 33% of median income and percent of population identifying as white. These results suggest that racial and political motivations may underlie the resurgence of drug-induced homicide laws, separate from perceptions of their efficacy.

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