My beloved, do you know / when the warm winds come again / another year will start to pass / circumstances afford me no second chance to tell you how much I’ve missed you.
Dear Mr. Orput:
The veins J used in his death were heart-shaped.

I remember countless times holding his hand, tracing those veins that started from a point, curved, and met in the middle. I remember joking that they contradicted his tattooed, bad-boy persona. He’d tell me that the creator knew J would live to love me, and that those veins would be a living testament to his love — unchangeable no matter what happened, there until he died.
Neither of us knew that it would happen so quickly, of course.
On August 31, 2009, J injected his hand with a syringe full of opiates that he’d gotten from his supplier. By the morning of September 1, he was dead. I was 1100 miles away, in my first week of law school in Washington, D.C. I was wearing an army-green skirt and a black Gap t-shirt, and when my mom called me, I sat down in the middle of the sidewalk on H. Street. Staffers on their way to the White House glared and walked around me as I gasped for breath, unable to comprehend the words.
I knew that he struggled with substance abuse. It was the reason we’d broken up, started dating again, and broken up again before I left for school. Adoring a person with an addiction is a special kind of hell that draws you back, has no clean exit, and is somehow still worth every second you spend together.
Like many people with addictions, J had a special empathy for people who were less fortunate than him. I saw him nearly come to blows defending a homeless man who was at the mercy of frat boys. I saw him give the coat off his back to a freezing woman in the winter. I saw him jump in the rapids of the St. Louis river to save a stranger’s dog. He wanted to save everyone but himself.
After that phone call, I stumbled through my first year of law school, and became a public defense intern the following summer. It was there, working in arraignments on a Friday afternoon, that I received a criminal complaint charging a low-level street dealer with third-degree homicide for J’s death.
I was outraged.
I could not believe that the State wanted another person — trapped in addiction, hustling only to feed his own demons — to go to prison, as if this would help restore the community. Before that summer, I had never interacted with the criminal courts, but I intrinsically knew what county attorneys throughout the state (including yourself) do not: sending someone to prison would not bring J back from the dead.
I was, of course, removed from that case due to the conflict. To my delight, the charges were eventually dismissed due to the hard work of the public defenders in that district.
In your interview with the New York Times, Mr. Orput, you acknowledged that charging third-degree homicide in overdose deaths does nothing to help the community — but you said that when someone overdoses, you have a dead kid, and someone “owes you” for that dead kid. You think someone has to pay.
You are wrong.
You are wrong because your job is to represent the public, and the public — people whom you serve, people who owe you nothing — the public are the people who pay when you get your personal revenge for an overdose.
We pay every time a person with an addiction goes to prison and loses what little they have in this community. We pay every time a person develops an addiction in prison. We pay every time a person does not receive the treatment they need in prison. We pay every time a person is released from prison and struggles to get a job, housing, and social support because they have the stigma of a felony. We pay when they die because drugs are all they have, and drugs are all they know — and then we pay again when you charge yet another drug user with homicide for that overdose, like a never-ending treadmill to hell.
You admitted knowing that charging third-degree homicide for overdose deaths does nothing to lessen the amount of drugs on the street. You know that charging third-degree homicide for overdose deaths makes us less safe. You know that charging third-degree homicide for overdose deaths does nothing to bring back the people we have loved and lost. Yet you still do it, because you feel like someone “owes you.”
I deeply implore you and every other county attorney in the state to cease charging third-degree homicide. In your short-sighted quest for vengeance, you are tearing apart the fragile families and support systems of those caught in addiction, and you are creating a more dangerous society for all of us.
J did not need to die, but he would have regardless of whom he’d contacted for drugs that late summer day. I have dedicated his memory to helping, not hurting, the people who struggle as much as he did. If you care about victims — the people left behind with aching hearts, the community missing a beloved member — I beg of you to put aside your own personal vengeance and do the same.
Author’s note: if you live in Hennepin County, Minnesota, and you are invested in restorative justice and public safety, please vote for Mark Haase for Hennepin County Attorney! He is invested in criminal justice reform and will help lead our city, state, and country to true justice.
