Another reminder of broad reach and applications of felony murder punishments

Over at Bolts, Michaela Markels has this lengthy piece about felony murder law in Alabama and elsewhere.  Especially as I am gearing up to teach 1L Crimnal Law this fall, I found this piece very much worth a full read. The piece’s full headline highlights its themes: “A Friend’s Death to Mourn, and to Serve Time for; An Alabama teen was shot alongside his friend, then prosecuted for his killing. His case highlights a particularly harsh doctrine in American criminal punishment: felony murder.”  Here is an extended excerpt providing lots of background and context for Alabama specifics (with links from the original):

Felony murder is a particularly American form of punishment.  The idea — that if you commit a felony, and someone dies in the process of that crime, you can be charged with murder, even if someone else committed the killing — was likely inherited from English common law.  However, the U.K. abolished the doctrine in the 1950s, following public unease over the execution of a 19-year-old Londoner for the murder of a policeman, who had been shot and killed by a 16-year-old accomplice during a robbery. (Another doctrine similar to felony murder reemerged in the U.K. in the 1980s, but in 2016 the Supreme Court significantly limited its scope.)

While other Commonwealth nations like Canada eventually abolished their versions of the felony murder doctrine, the charge became even more widespread in the U.S. under mass incarceration.  Today, forty-eight states permit some version of the charge.  Alabama is one of 14 states where felony murder can be applied most broadly, allowing prosecutors to charge defendants with the death of an accomplice, even when the killing was committed by someone else. Felony murder, like other murder charges in the state, is punishable by up to life in prison or even the death penalty — as illustrated by the case of Nathaniel Woods, who was executed in 2020 for the murder of three Birmingham police officers who were shot by someone else.

Law enforcement officials who prosecute people for murder under the doctrine say it aims to hold people responsible for creating dangerous situations with potentially fatal outcomes.  But critics of felony murder say the charge undermines baseline tenets of criminal law—namely, that murder requires criminal intent, or mens rea (Latin for “guilty mind”).  

“Basic criminal law is that intentional murder requires mens rea and actus rea — criminal intent and criminal act. You learn that in your first semester of criminal law,” said defense attorney Mark McDaniel, who formerly served as a special assistant attorney general in Alabama. “Where is that in felony murder? It’s not there, there’s zero intent.”  The seeming disconnect of prosecuting someone for murder over a killing they didn’t actually commit often sparks public outrage and confusion around felony murder cases, including in Alabama, where McDaniel says the charge is still commonly used by prosecutors. 

Darnell Coates and Lonze Byrd, for instance, were charged with the murder of William Michael Thomas, who died from a heart attack after confronting the men while they were trying to steal catalytic converters and other scrap from his recycling business in Greensboro in 2019; Thomas, 60, punctured the tires on Coates’ car to try and prevent him from fleeing and fired a warning shot before he collapsed.  In 2021, law enforcement in Mobile charged Jamon Merrida and Demarcus Longmire with the murder of their friend Calvin Horne Jr., after the three went to buy marijuana and Horne was shot and killed by a third party.  In 2022, Casey White was charged with murder for the death of a corrections officer who had helped him escape the Lauderdale County jail, and who subsequently took her own life following a high-speed police chase.

Another infamous case in Alabama shows how felony murder can allow police to kill someone and pin the murder charge on someone else. In 2015, LaKeith Smith, then 15 years old, and four friends broke into some unoccupied homes to steal video games and other electronics when a neighbor called the police. While Smith ran into the woods, one of his friends, 16-year-old A’Donte Washington, was shot and killed by one of the responding officers after allegedly running toward them with a weapon. Police charged the rest of the four teens with felony murder and prosecuted them as adults. Smith, who is Black and was the youngest among them, was the only one who refused to accept a plea deal and took his case to trial, where an all-white jury convicted him of murder; a judge sentenced Smith to 65 years behind bars, which an appeals court later reduced to 30 years.

There is no full accounting of how many people have been sent to prison for felony murder and for how long. In Alabama, like many states, officials do not specifically track felony murder charges but record them simply as murder—making the charge on Young’s record indistinguishable from premeditated or first-degree murder charges, with the same range of potential penalties.

In 2022, Sarah Stillman, a staff writer at The New Yorker, began working with students and colleagues at the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale to gauge the scope and impact of the punishment. That work led to the Felony Murder Reporting Project (of which I am a part), which between early 2022 and late 2023 collected and analyzed over 10,000 cases of people charged with felony murder, to create a public data hub for exploring how the charge is applied across the country.  The Lab’s analysis revealed that felony murder is disproportionately imposed on low-income defendants, young people and people of color. 

In Alabama, defendants with felony murder charges skew especially young, according to state records obtained by the Lab. Between 2009 and 2017, people charged with felony murder in Alabama were nearly nine years younger on average than those charged with other crimes.  During the same time period, 83 percent of people charged with felony murder in Alabama were Black, even though the state population is only about 27 percent Black. That means a Black Alabaman is 13 times more likely to be charged with felony murder than their white counterpart. 

Records compiled by the Lab also show that, between 2009 and 2017, almost 10 percent of all murder charges in Alabama, or 281 cases, were actually for felony murder. Of those 281 people, 70 percent were convicted, meaning nearly 200 people in Alabama are likely still serving time behind bars for murders that they didn’t actually commit.  Jenkins was shocked when his brother became one of them. “I just never got it,” he said. “I never understood it.”