In 39 States, People Can Be Sentenced to Life for Murders They Did Not Commit
· Reason
When he was 19, Jamie Meade participated in a robbery that turned lethal. But it was Meade's partner in crime who actually shot the victim (accidentally, he said). Meade nevertheless was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to life without parole, while the killer pleaded guilty to lesser offenses and received a 12-year sentence. When Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer commuted Meade's sentence last year, he had served 31 years. By contrast, the man who fired the gun, who spent 10 years in prison, has been free since 2008.
Manifestly unjust results like those are a product of laws that treat people as murderers when they participate in felonies that result in someone's death, even when they did not intend, anticipate, or cause that outcome. A new report from the Sentencing Project highlights the perverse effects of the felony murder rule—a vestige of British law that still prevails in federal courts and all but two states nearly seven decades after the U.K. abandoned it.
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Felony murder laws "violate the principle of proportional sentencing, which is supposed to punish crimes based on their severity," Sentencing Project Research Director Nazgol Ghandnoosh and her two co-authors say. "With one in six people in U.S. prisons serving a life sentence, ending mass incarceration requires bold action to reduce extreme prison terms such as those prescribed for felony murder. These laws run counter to public safety, fiscal responsibility, and justice."
Hawaii and Kentucky are the only states that do not have felony murder laws. Of the 48 states that do, 10 impose a mandatory sentence of life without parole (LWOP) on any adult convicted of felony murder, which is also what federal law requires. Eleven states mandate LWOP sentences for certain felony murder convictions, while 18 allow them and nine do not. The report notes that "approximately half of U.S. states allow death sentences for unintentional killings under felony murder laws."
A map showing states' policies on life sentences without parole (LWOP) for felony murder (The Sentencing Project)Although there are no national data on people serving LWOP sentences for felony murder, they seem to account for a substantial share of such penalties. As of 2019, Ghandnoosh et al. report, a quarter of LWOP prisoners in Michigan and Pennsylvania—more than 1,000 in each state—had been convicted of felony murder.
The counterintuitive consequences of felony murder laws go beyond treating accomplices as severely as killers (or, as in Meade's case, even more severely). "Members of a group engaged in a felony [can] be convicted of murder when someone outside of their group, such as a police officer or victim, kills," Ghandnoosh et al. note. If a cop confronts a group of burglars and fatally shoots one of them, for instance, the others can be charged with murder. An accomplice likewise can be charged with murder when police kill a robber. Felony murder charges can also be deployed against friends, relatives, or dealers who supply drugs to people who subsequently die from overdoses.
The moral premise of these laws is that people should be held responsible for the consequences of choosing to commit a felony, which they should know carries a risk that someone will die. But that risk is tiny in many cases.
"A study of Chicago in the early 1980s found that approximately 0.6% of reported robberies resulted in homicide," Ghandnoosh et al. write. "The mortality rate for reported burglaries is less than 0.02%." They add that "death is not a foreseeable consequence of sharing or selling drugs because drug use overwhelmingly does not result in death."
The report notes another weird wrinkle created by felony murder laws: In some states, an assault that results in death can qualify as the underlying felony, a practice that erases the distinction between intentional and unintentional homicide. That is what happened with Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd. Although it seemed clear that Chauvin did not intend to kill Floyd, he was convicted of murder for reckless conduct that looked more like manslaughter.
Something similar happened to Jonathan Miller, a Georgia teenager who was convicted of murder and sent to prison for life after a fight in which he punched another teenager, Josh Belluardo, in the back of the head. Although that blow proved fatal, Ghandnoosh et al. note, "a medical examiner testified that the punch that resulted in Belluardo's death had a 1-in-2,300 chance of rupturing the blood vessel that caused his brain to bleed."
In addition to regularly imposing disproportionate penalties, felony murder laws compound the problem of coercive plea bargaining. Prosecutors "use felony murder charges to incentivize plea deals," Ghandnoosh et al. write. When a felony murder charge is on the table, defendants have a strong incentive to forgo a trial and instead plead guilty to lesser charges "carrying still-lengthy sentences out of proportion to their actual offense." Since prosecutors can obtain a murder conviction without proving recklessness, let alone a specific intent to kill, "fighting a felony murder charge at trial can seem impossible."
Ghandnoosh et al. also argue that felony murder laws waste taxpayer money by locking people up long after they are apt to commit new crimes, since recidivism declines sharply with age. Nor does the threat of such sentences accomplish much in the way of deterrence, they say, since "most people do not expect to be apprehended for a crime, are not familiar with relevant legal penalties, or commit crime with their judgment compromised by substance use or mental health problems."
The report recommends that legislators "repeal felony murder statutes and punish these crimes as their constituent parts—often a felony and an unintentional killing." Short of that, Ghandnoosh et al. say, several reforms would help curtail the injustices caused by felony murder laws.
"Jurisdictions should eliminate the most extreme sentences—death and LWOP—for felony murder, and ensure that felony murder convictions result in less harsh punishment than intentional murders," Ghandnoosh et al. write. "Jurisdictions should eliminate application of the felony murder law to predicate offenses that have an extremely low risk of death, including robbery, burglary, and drug law violations. Assault should not serve as a predicate felony, to avoid extending murder liability to unintentional killings. Also, killings by people who were not involved in the commission of the felony, such as by a police officer or victim, should not subject the individuals committing the offense to felony murder charges."
The Sentencing Project urges prosecutors to "address charging and plea practices that exacerbate racial and ethnic disparities, such as expansive charging of accomplices and unjustifiably unfavorable plea offers to people of color." It says "jurisdictions should allow judicial review of sentences for people who pled to lesser crimes because they were threatened with murder sentences under overly expansive felony murder laws."
The report also recommends changes to the treatment of accomplices, who "have a lower level of culpability," and young people, who "have a weaker grasp of the potential consequences of their criminal activity." At a minimum, Ghandnoosh et al. say, legislators "should narrow accomplice liability to major participants in the underlying felony who acted with reckless indifference to human life in the killing." Along similar lines, the report urges legislators to "institute meaningful intent requirements for a killing to be considered felony murder, assessing the defendant's mental state with respect to the killing itself, not to the underlying felony offense."
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