I'm dropping this article here because I believe our inability to enforce laws here uniformly across socioeconomic/gender/race will lead to further instability (and doomsday) here in the US: it's an interesting long form journalism article about the unintended consequences of felony murder convictions. I don't give a fuck about criminals, I wouldn't shed a tear for a car burglar if they got crushed stealing a cat, but this article did make me consider whether or not it makes sense to enforce some of the draconian felony murder statutes that exist in various states
A draconian legal doctrine called felony murder has put thousands of Americans—disproportionately young and Black—in prison.
www.newyorker.com
Highlights:
- Felony murder is the idea that if you committed a felony and a death results from the crime even if you weren't directly involved in the death, you can be charged with felony murder in some states. Some states like FL go further and impose mandatory life sentences w/o parole
- Lead example was a black guy who decided to break into cars with his budy after losing money at a casino in FL. He went with a friend, Stole some baseball equipment, some loose change, and sunglasses from a few different cars. A guy caught him and he was arrested. As his friend who was going with him to commit these crimes passes by in his car, the victim IDs the car and a cop chase ensues. The criminal driver runs over two bicyclists. Noone gives a shit about the driver (he DID cause these deaths). However, the first guy, despite already being arrested and several miles away, gets hit with felony murder charges. He was offered a plea deal in which he'd do <5 years for the auto crimes and they'd drop the felony murder charge but decided to go to trial. By admitting he committed the auto burglaries, he goes away for life b/c of mandatory minimum sentences.
- Apparently its used by DAs in states where the laws have mandatory min sentencing to extract much more significant plea deals. It's an overpowered tool which seems to lead to it being applied when the link between the perp and the killing incident is tenuous.
- Felony murder charges can happen even if its the police who shoot a perp dead. The other guys in the crew can be hit with felony murder charges. I'm less sure about this one.
- Young people tend to get charged more with FM than murder charges... often because they tend to commit crimes in groups.
- People of influence rarely catch these charges: its disproportionately prosecuted on people of color than other races. The racial angle is interesting but I'm not sure how much to read into this statistic as people of different races/socioeconomic levels commit crimes at different rates.
- one example they gave which caught my interest: if trump is convicted of a felony around the Jan 6 insurrection, could felony murder charges be brought on him b/c the storming of the capitol lead directly to a few deaths?
My key takeaway: don't crime, esp if you don't have the complexion for the protection. If you do decide to commit crimes, do it alone. You might show restraint in your getaway but your co-conspirators might not and screw you.