Opinion - Felony Murder Laws Don't Fit the Crime or Keep Us Safe
Felony murder laws have adverse effects on people of color, young people and women
Opinion as appears in Marketwatch; By Miriam Aroni Krinsky and Nazgol Ghandnoosh
Today, almost 2 million people, disproportionately Black Americans, are incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. The prison population has grown almost 500% since 1973, and more than one in seven people in U.S. prisons is serving a life sentence. Moreover, while the U.S. represents just 4% of the global population, its prisons hold 40% of all individuals worldwide serving a life sentence.
Over the past 50 years, lawmakers nationwide enacted several extreme sentencing policies that disregard the legal system’s efforts to advance proportionality, which means punishing crimes according to their level of harm and intent. Most notably, felony murder laws allow prosecutors to charge people with murder because they participated in a felony that resulted in someone being killed — even if the individual did not directly cause or intend the loss of life.
The criminal legal system loses credibility when someone can be sentenced to life without parole for simply being in the same room as a person who took a life. It is in clear tension with how our legal system is supposed to work, where a criminal sentence is proportional to the moral weight of a crime and accounts for the actions of the individual.
Research also shows that felony murder laws don’t make us any safer. For example, a legal studies thesis from UC Berkeley found no significant or consistent correlation between felony murder laws and crime rates or crime-related deaths. Another study by a University of Chicago Law School professor found that the felony murder rule did not significantly reduce the number of deaths during a felony. And more generally, sentence severity has not proven to be an effective deterrent to crime.
At the same time, felony murder laws have adverse effects on people of color, young people and women. For example, in Pennsylvania in 2020, 80% of imprisoned people with a felony murder conviction were people of color and 70% were Black. Additionally, almost three-fourths of people serving life without parole for felony murder in 2019 in Pennsylvania were age 25 or younger at the time of their offense. So were more than half of Minnesotans charged with aiding and abetting felony murder in recent years.
Because felony murder laws impose identical sentences on individuals regardless of their role in the crime, they can produce especially unjust punishments for women who are coerced by intimate partners. An exploratory survey of people currently incarcerated in California found that 72% of women serving a life sentence for felony murder were not the perpetrators of the homicide, compared to 55% of men.
After 50 years of mass incarceration, it’s time for America to wake up and find a better path forward. Abolishing felony murder laws is the right place to start.
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Read the full opinion piece "‘Felony Murder’ Laws Impose Punishment That Doesn’t Fit the Crime or Keep Us Safer" at the Marketwatch website.
