Onetime Democratic donor Ed Buck was sentenced to 30 years in prison Thursday for drug and sex crimes determined to have caused the overdose deaths of two men.
Prosecutors and Buck’s attorneys have agreed to postpone a hearing to determine how much Buck must pay in restitution while his lawyers gather records of his finances. Buck asked the court to “take a look at my life in total” and not “the horrible caricature the government painted me as” before being sentenced, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“Buck does not value human life beyond his own,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Chelsea Norell wrote to Judge Christina Snyder. “He used human beings as playthings, destroying their lives merely to appease his own sexual gratifications.”
TEENAGE OVERDOSE DEATHS SAW BIGGEST INCREASE DURING PANDEMIC DESPITE LOWER DRUG USE
Buck should be imprisoned for life to punish him and protect the public because “he would feed his compulsion to inject others until the day he died” if he were released, prosecutors argued.
The two-week trial consisted of male witnesses saying Buck used the gay hookup site Adam4Adam to advertise his interest in “party and play” sessions, a term for using meth during sex. One witness, Carlos, claimed to have visited Buck’s apartment, where Buck would inject him with meth and GHB, a party drug, about 20 times over a six-month period.
A jury convicted Buck of several felonies in 2021, including distributing meth resulting in death and enticement to cross state lines to engage in prostitution.
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Buck’s actions resulted in the deaths of Gemmel Moore, 26, and Timothy Dean, 55, who both overdosed on meth they’d been injected with in July 2017 and January 2019, respectively, jurors found. Dane Brown, another man who met up with Buck, was injected with three doses of the drug in September 2019 before he managed to make his way to a nearby gas station and contact the authorities, who arrested Buck a week later.
Buck’s donations to Democratic coffers topped $500,000 over the past 20 years.
