COA hears appeal of murder charge in opioid injection death

Arguments as to whether a man may be charged with murder after he injected his wife with a fatal dose of fentanyl that they both believed was heroin were presented to an appellate panel Wednesday.

Nathanial Walmsley, charged with felony murder of his wife Rachel, argued before Indiana Court of Appeals Chief Judge Nancy Vaidik, Judge Robert Altice and James Kirsch that his act of injecting Rachel with what he claimed to have thought was heroin did not constitute dealing in a narcotic drug in Nathaniel C. Walmsley v. State of Indiana, 18A-CR-2506.

After allegedly consulting with Rachel, Walmsley had purchased drugs from James Trimnell, and Walmsley injected himself and his wife. She overdosed and died that day. Walmsley unsuccessfully filed a motion to dismiss his felony murder charge in Ripley County, arguing that injecting Rachel with drugs that they jointly purchased and possessed did not amount to dealing.

In an interlocutory appeal on behalf of Walmsley, Bargersville criminal defense attorney Stacy Uliana argued the case was one of overcharging for two reasons. First, she argued Walmsley could not deal to Rachel because she had purchased and possessed the drugs with him.

In support of her argument, Uliana noted that Walmsley’s case differed from that in Duncan v. State, 857 N.E.2d 955 (Ind. 2006), finding that case to be an outlier in which a child died after consuming one-fourth of his grandmother’s prescribed methadone tablet.

“There that child had no choice and could not be co-possessor or purchaser,” Uliana argued. In contrast, she pointed to the lengthy drug abuse history between Walmsley and his wife during their marriage, noting that both he and Rachel knew Trimnell was their dealer and that the couple had discussed purchasing drugs to use together on the day of her death.

Uliana continued her argument by noting that the Indiana statute says “a motion to dismiss shall be granted if the state’s facts alleged do not support the offense charged.” Here, she argued, Rachel was proven beyond the preponderance of the evidence to be a part of the drug deal.

Secondly, Uliana argued that the Indiana Legislature did not intend for its new felony murder statute to be applied to adult overdose cases because it leads to unfair results and illogically punishes low-level drug addicts while absolving the high-level drug dealers.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Trimnell is not going to be charged with felony murder. He undisputedly dealt the bad drugs, but yet the man himself who injected himself and almost died, and his wife died, is being charged. That shows the absurdity of applying felony murder in this situation.

“If it’s not foreseeable for Trimnell to think Rachel could have overdosed, then it’s not foreseeable for Nathaniel Walmsley,” she said.

Uliana added that Walmsley’s act of injecting Rachel could not be considered dealing because transfer could not solely mean “physical transfer back and forth” because then any co-possession would be considered dealing.

“If a husband and wife own drugs together, every time they pass a joint back and forth they’re now dealing. That makes absolutely no sense, right? So we have to interpret the word transfer to mean some kind of giving of possession or control. And you can’t give possession of control to someone who already possesses it,” she said.

Deputy attorney general Ian McLean, representing the state, countered that the state properly charged Walmsley because he delivered the drugs to Rachel when he injected them into her arm.

“It simply doesn’t matter that they bought it together and it simply doesn’t matter what they expected to do with it,” McLean argued. “What matters is that Mr. Walmsley gave it to her. He injected it straight into her vein. It doesn’t matter if she co-possessed it beforehand or what their arrangements were. It doesn’t matter, period, because he had it, she didn’t.”

The state further argued that Walmsley was not entitled to dismissal based on controlling precedent in Duncan, and that even if the standard for viewing a motion to dismiss were to change, the circumstances of the case at hand is the delivery of a drug as a crime.

“There’s no exception here for friends, relatives, co-workers, etc. It flat out says that what he did when he shot her up was delivery. There’s no other way around that,” McLean said. “I think it’s appropriate to refute the argument that we’re overcharging anything in this case.”

The full oral argument can be watched here.