Noting the first beneficiaries of Minnesota’s felony murder reforms

A helpful reader made sure I did not miss this effective review of the recent sentencing consequences of Minnesota’s recent reforms of its felony murder laws.  Here are part of the story and some context:

Two women convicted in connection with a 2017 home invasion murder were released from prison last week because of a change in state law. Megan Christine Cater, 25, of Lakeville and Briana Marie Martinson, 27, of Prior Lake are the first people to be released from custody after legislators overhauled Minnesota’s felony murder statute.

While the two admitted taking part in the burglary of Corey Elder’s apartment, a judge found that they did not share responsibility for his murder….

Cater and Martinson were not in the bedroom with [Maurice] Verser when he fired the fatal shot. But in a deal with prosecutors, the women pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting second-degree unintentional murder. In 2018, Judge Kerry Meyer sentenced them to 13.5 years each. Then in 2023, lawmakers in the DFL-led Minnesota Legislature put new restrictions around the state’s felony murder statute. Under the old law, prosecutors could charge a person with aiding and abetting murder during the commission of an underlying felony no matter their role in that felony.

Mary Moriarty, a longtime public defender who was elected Hennepin County Attorney in 2022, supports the change. “It is not fair when two people get charged with murder when one of them pulled the trigger and the other one had no idea this was going to happen,” Moriarty said. “Certainly both people have to be held accountable, but they should be held accountable for what they actually do.”

Moriarty noted that under the old felony murder law, a killer who signs a plea deal could wind up with a shorter sentence than his accomplice who drove the getaway car and is convicted at trial.

The revised statute limits felony murder prosecutions to people who caused the victim’s death, intended to cause it, or were major participants in the underlying crime. Legislators made the changes retroactive. That allowed Cater and Martinson to petition the court to vacate their murder convictions. Last week, Judge Meyer resentenced Martinson and Cater to 57 and 69 months respectively for burglary with a firearm. Because they’d already served that time, the two left prison….

In an email to MPR News, Cater’s attorney and University of Minnesota law professor JaneAnne Murray said that Minnesota’s old felony murder law has resulted in sentences for too many defendants that are disproportionate to their culpability. “Our client was only 19 at the time of her offense, and she did not intend or participate in a murder,” Murray wrote. “It is right and just that she, and many similarly-situated to her, get punished for what they did, and not for the conduct of others.”

Bobbie Elder, Corey Elder’s mother, countered that the women were major participants in the burglary and their felony murder convictions should stand, even under the new law. “Megan Cater and Briana Martinson were the masterminds behind this entire thing,” Elder told MPR News. “They were the planners of it. They were the ones who ensured that there was a gun on scene. If all they wanted to do was rob somebody, they wouldn’t have had to go to the extremes of planning what they did….”

Last month Meyer rejected Tarrance Murphy’s bid for a sentence reduction after determining that he was a major participant in the robbery and admitted pointing the gun at Townsend.

Long-standing complaints about felony-murder laws among academics and many others typically focus on the failure of such laws to match offense levels and sentencing outcomes to true culpability, especially in situations in which a defedant has little or no culpable mens rea with respect to someone else’s killing.  But, as the comments by the mother of the victim here highlights, judgments about culpability can often be highly contested.  This story suggests that the new Minnesota law give judges consideable discretion to assess culpability in this context (though that has to be challenging to do many years after an offense).