When a jury determined earlier this year that Jake Johnson had been murdered, it had seen no weapon. Prosecutors didn't even try to establish intent, and they conceded the victim played a key role in his own death.
Yet the second-degree murder conviction brought the killer the same mandatory life-without-parole sentence handed out routinely to shooters and stabbers. All prosecutors had to establish was that defendant Jeanie Hano, 42, had sold methadone to the 16-year-old victim and that the same pills contributed to his death by overdose.
The conviction in Covington came 18 years after then-state Sen. William Jefferson tacked on a little-noticed amendment to the state's second-degree murder statute, creating a new category of murderer: dealers who peddle deadly drugs.
The obscure statute had been all but ignored by law enforcement before Johnson's death, which resulted in the only known conviction under the statute. But a Kenner woman booked last week in the overdose death of her twin sister joins the recently growing list of defendants arrested under the murder-by-drug-dealing law.
With two similar cases awaiting trial in St. Tammany Parish, and Baton Rouge prosecutors securing two lesser convictions in another overdose-as-murder case, police and lawyers have in the past year given the statute the most attention it has received since it was enacted in 1987. Nevertheless, those who investigate these deaths and lawyers who defend the accused dealers predict that prosecutions under the law will never represent more than a sliver of the state's fatal overdoses.
Police predict convictions will remain low. They say it's often extremely difficult to prove the connection between an overdose victim, the drug that killed him and the person who sold or gave him the substance.
But defense lawyers contend potential juries are responsible for the law's limited exposure in Louisiana courts. They predict jurors are less likely to hand down a murder conviction for an illegal drug sale than they would for a cold-blooded killing.
Take the case of Shannon Morvant, 19, a Nicholls State University student who was found dead in a friend's car Dec. 19, 2004, after a night of partying.
Lafourche Parish sheriff's investigators alleged that Hardy Ledet, 19, had likely passed out quadruple-strength Xanax pills at the party, and they geared up for an arrest under the second-degree murder statute. They interviewed more than 50 people and awaited a coroner's report to make the law's required link between a seller and the drug determined to be the cause of death.
"We literally uncovered every conceivable stone that existed," Sheriff Craig Webre said.

Unable to use charge
Yet the toxicology report revealed fatal levels of Clozapine, a powerful treatment for schizophrenia and a drug not found in the state's list of controlled dangerous substances. Unable to bring the murder charge against Ledet, prosecutors could do little more than have his three-year probation from a previous drug charge revoked.
"This is the real tragedy, beyond the loss of Shannon Morvant, is that Hardy Ledet in my estimation should be spending the rest of his life incarcerated," Webre said. "He was offering drugs to anyone and everyone, and providing them chemicals that were being misrepresented and having an indifferent attitude about it."
Beyond the difficulty of investigating murder-by-drug-dealing, the cases face challenges once they enter a courtroom, especially when the line blurs between the overdose victim and the alleged perpetrator.
In February, Baton Rouge prosecutors brought Heather Smith, 26, to trial on second-degree murder charges in the Aug. 25, 2001, death of her best friend, Marsha Fisher, 32. Both women wanted to purchase Ecstasy, but Fisher couldn't cash her paycheck that night. Randall Corbett, 34, Fisher's boyfriend, cashed his own check and gave Smith $255 to buy 15 tablets, according to court records. Hours later, he found Fisher dead in her bedroom.
Prosecutor Darwin Miller said Smith's actions to buy the drugs, then deliver them to Fisher's apartment, fit the murder statute. He said Corbett's actions of distributing some of the pills to Fisher also amounted to homicide.
When jury selection began in Smith's case, potential jurors struggled with the law that turned a consensual night of drug use into murder.
"You should have heard one of the ladies on the jury," said defense attorney Francis "Bo" Rougeou. "She says, 'You mean to tell me this lady took these drugs on her own?' Yes. 'Nobody forced them down her throat?' No. 'And she died?' Yes. 'So why are we here?' "
The woman ended up on the jury. But Rougeou never learned how the panel would have decided the case. Smith took a 10-year plea deal midway through the trial. "She said, 'I could do this much time, but I can't do life,' " Rougeou said.
At Corbett's trial in October, jurors convicted him of the lesser charges of negligent homicide and possession with intent to deliver Ecstasy. A judge sentenced him to five years in prison.
Miller conceded that the biggest challenge to prosecuting murder-by-drug-dealing is jury nullification, when jurors don't follow the law because they disagree with it.
"The victim in my case actively desired to take the drug that ultimately caused her death," Miller said. "She wanted it. She wanted to buy it. She just couldn't cash a check. . . . This isn't a situation where the victim didn't know she was being drugged."

A matter of perspective
Eric Sterling, founder of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, said the quandary jurors grapple with in these cases is the result of state and federal legislators racing in the 1980s to elevate drug crimes to the status of violent crimes. He said that from a criminal justice perspective, most drug sales that result in overdoses don't compare to cold-blooded killings.
"Is the seller at fault for selling something that the buyer knows is risky to ingest?" Sterling said. "They have to take the action of seeking it out and buying it and ingesting it."
What sets the sole conviction in St. Tammany apart from the scant other overdose deaths prosecuted under Louisiana's murder statute is Jake Johnson's age, 16.
Chad Falgout, 37, whom police said initiated the methadone sale to the teen, accepted a plea bargain in September to avoid following his former girlfriend, Hano, to prison for life. A judge sentenced him to 15 years for manslaughter, which First Assistant District Attorney Houston Gascon said his office accepted, given the greater difficulty connecting Falgout to the methadone that plunged Johnson into a coma from which he never recovered.
Sterling said that, as in other murder cases, the victim's identity plays a powerful role in what charges are brought and what sentences are sought.
"Overdose deaths are often not sympathetic cases to bring, because very often the victims are longtime drug users who are looked down upon by police and prosecutors," Sterling said. "But teenagers taking pills, dying in the flower of their youth, are much more sympathetic."
With both prosecutions in the Fisher death concluded, even Miller conceded that the Baton Rouge case had a finer moral line than Johnson's methadone overdose.
"You certainly have a profiteer in that case," Miller said. "You've got somebody who's acting on greed, who's taking advantage of someone who has a weakness . . . making a poor decision."

Twin faces charge
But when Jefferson Parish jurors consider the Kenner murder case, they'll have to grapple with perhaps the toughest decision of all when sorting out sympathy for the victim or the defendant.
Kenner police said Rebecca A. Doussan, 26, violated the murder-by-drug-dealing law on Dec. 6, 2004, after injecting cocaine with her twin, Rachel Smith. Police said Doussan sought out more cocaine from a drug supplier the same night, gave the drugs to her sister and left her in an apartment alone. The next morning, Doussan found Smith dead, submerged in a bathtub behind a locked bathroom door.
Police also issued an arrest warrant for Joseph Michael Bruno II, 42, alleged to be the cocaine supplier, who faces second-degree murder charges.
To Jessica Dabdoub, 30, the victim and defendant are equals: both sisters taken out of her life. Unlike most families of violent crime victims, Dabdoub's relatives have no plans to support prosecutors' efforts.
"Even if it wasn't my sister, she chose what she did," Dabdoub said of her deceased younger sister. "None of us blame Rebecca."