The severity of felony murder responsibility

In today’s New York Times, Adam Liptak has this article entitled, “Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers.”  Here are a few excerpts:

The felony murder rule, which has many variations, generally broadens murder liability for participants in violent felonies in two ways. An unintended killing during a felony is considered murder under the rule….

India and other common law countries have followed England in abolishing the doctrine. In 1990, the Canadian Supreme Court did away with felony murder liability for accomplices, saying it violated “the principle that punishment must be proportionate to the moral blameworthiness of the offender.”  Countries outside the common law tradition agree.  “The view in Europe,” said James Q. Whitman, a professor of comparative law at Yale, “is that we hold people responsible for their own acts and not the acts of others.”

But prosecutors and victims’ rights groups in the United States say that punishing accomplices as though they had been the actual killers is perfectly appropriate….  Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ rights group, said “all perpetrators of the underlying felony, not just the one who pulls the trigger” should be held accountable for murder.