A federal court sentenced a Texas man to more than 20 years in prison on Thursday after he pled guilty to selling synthetic drugs that killed two North Dakota teens in 2012.

After pleading guilty in March, 29-year-old Charles Carlton from Katy, Texas was ordered to spend 20 years and six months in federal prison for three charges including conspiring in the distribution of controlled substances leading to bodily injury and death, selling of misbranded drugs, and money laundering.

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Carlton is the 15^th and final defendant in the case involving two North Dakota teens who died due to drug overdoses.

Christian Bjerk, 18-years-old, from Grand Forks, died a week before 17-year-old Elijah Stai of Park Rapids. Both died after ingesting hallucinogens they had gotten from Andrew Spofford.

According to investigators, Spofford cooked up the drugs he bought from Carlton, a self-proclaimed hallucinogen expert, resulting in the two teens' deaths and the hospitalization of three others.

Spofford was sentenced earlier to over 17 years in federal prison.

Carlton, dubbed by court as the "worst actor they had ever seen," was faced with lifetime imprisonment without parole as a maximum penalty.

During Thursday's hearing, Carlton's attorney claimed that his client was wrongly fixated with the longest imprisonment while there have been others who received lesser sentences, despite being just as responsible as he was for the deaths.  

He also said that his client has agreed to be interviewed for a public service documentary on synthetic drugs, citing that Carlton is 'desperate to make amends for what he has done.'

According to prosecutors, Carlton owned the majority of a company that purportedly sold controlled substances from Asia and Europe. Called Motion Resources LLC, the company allegedly makes several hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling them online.

In the U.S., it is unlawful to sell such substances for human consumption and investigations revealed that Carlton allegedly changed his company's name and continued selling them even after finding out about the death of the two teens from North Dakota.

Tagssynthetic drugs, overdose, drug death, illegal drugs, north dakota teens, drug dealer