Opinion - Felony Murder Should Be Removed From Maryland Law

The following snippets are from an opinion piece by Margaret Martin Barry, a a member of the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club and founder/ former director of the Re-Entry Clinic at American University Washington College of Law, was featured in Maryland Matters, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news site following Maryland government and politics.

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To prove premeditated first-degree murder, the most extreme form of murder, the state must prove that the defendant intended to kill, was conscious of that intent, and had time to think about that intent.

Except when the state doesn’t have to prove intent — at all.

Indeed, many people sit in Maryland prisons for decades or for their entire lives who never intended to kill. They serve sentences for first-degree murder because the law tells prosecutors not to worry about proving intent to kill; if the defendant was involved in one of a certain list of felonies, it doesn’t matter whether the killing was planned or the defendant did or even knew of the killing at all.

Despite our very stringent penalties for the felonies that trigger felony murder, the theory goes that if a person dies during commission of, for example, a robbery, burglary or arson, all involved in that crime should know death could happen. Premeditation and intent go out the window. An accident, a reaction, another member of a group’s intent to kill sweep all into the worst punishment our laws dole out.

The United States remains virtually the only western country that still recognizes a legal principle that makes it possible “that the most serious sanctions known to law might be imposed for accidental homicide.” England abolished felony murder in 1957, and the doctrine never existed in France or Germany.

Maryland’s use of felony murder, either as a tool for prosecutors to pressure people into pleas or to gain first-degree murder convictions because causation and intent are not required, is particularly insidious as applied to Black people who enter the system. Maryland has the distinction of being among the worst states when it comes to incarceration of Black people, at more than double the national average. Felony murder fuels the worst tendencies, allowing incarceration for life or life without parole despite lacking the level of culpability we think of in relation to such harsh penalties.

With the General Assembly early in its 2023 session, there is again the opportunity to do away with this unjust provision in our laws. Felony murder should be removed from Maryland law by deleting subsection (a)(4) of MD Crim. Law §2-201, and by providing for resentencing based on the underlying felony alone for those convicted of felony murder in the past. Doing so would remove from our laws this fictional intent to kill and the unfair sentencing it fosters. Any legislation that moves in this direction should be supported.

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Read the full opinion piece titled "Felony Murder Should Be Removed from Maryland Law" at the Maryland Matters website.