Felony Murder Rule in Missouri - Opposite of Progress

In 2018, police near the southwestern Missouri town of Aurora pulled over a car driven by 21-year-old Savannah Hill as they were trying to arrest her passenger, Mason Farris, for a parole violation after serving time for drug possession and theft. Prosecutors believed Farris, who wanted Hill to flee, reached up and pushed Hill's leg, causing her to accelerate. The car lurched backward and struck one of the officers, according to prosecutors.

That's when a second officer shot into the car and killed Hill.

Prosecutors said Farris pushing on Hill's leg and causing the car to hit the officer constituted resisting arrest, and that led to Hill's death. Despite not firing the shot that killed Hill, despite not intending to kill Hill, and despite not being in possession of a gun at all during the event that led to Hill's death, the knowledge that Missouri prosecutors regularly charged to people with felony murder to leverage offenders to plead guilty to lesser crimes associated with a death, Farris accepted a plea deal that saw him sentenced to 10 years in prison for two charges of resisting arrest.

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Despite efforts elsewhere in the United States to weaken and eliminate the felony murder doctrine, Missouri is one of the few states where any felony, no matter the seriousness, can be the basis for a felony murder charge. Guyora Binder, a law professor at the University at Buffalo who has written a book on felony murder, said Missouri is one of the easiest states for prosecutors to convict someone of felony murder.

Binder said in Missouri, felony murder cases also don't require that the death be caused by an agent of the felony. So, for example, if a police officer hit and killed a pedestrian while pursuing a fleeing suspect, the fleeing suspect could be charged with murder.

"In Missouri, you have seen people charged with felony murder as a result of participating in felonies that are pretty minor crimes or don't seem inherently dangerous. If police are overzealous or careless using force, it can be blamed on one of the felons that they are trying to arrest. That creates some perverse incentives for prosecutors."

Our system of laws and resulting criminal justice punishment is traced to the concept of proportional punishment, which relies on the use of degrees of culpability. Degrees of culpability work to ensure that a person who is charged with the least culpable behavior is not punished as severely as someone who is charged with purposeful, or most culpable behavior. The blanket application of the felony murder rule in Missouri directly violates this basic tenet of our criminal justice system.