Case Explained: When Murder Charges Reach People Who Didn’t Kill – Legal Perspective

Until her son’s criminal prosecution, Joanne Scheer had never heard of felony murder, a legal doctrine that allows a person to be charged with murder if a death occurs during the commission of a dangerous felony — even if the killing was unintentional, accidental or carried out by an accomplice.

In 2009, Scheer’s son, Anthony Vigeant, was convicted under the doctrine and sentenced at age 22 to life in prison for the death of a man in Southern California during a home robbery in 2007.

Prosecutors said Vigeant and his cousin, Trevor Glenn Landers, each U.S. Marines at the time, recruited Ramon Hernandez, a combat-injured veteran of the Iraq War, into burglarizing the house of David Pettigrew. Hernandez shot and killed Pettigrew during the intrusion, which arose out of a cocaine deal. At trial, Vigeant was found to be a “major participant” to the killing.

“He didn’t kill anybody,” Scheer said. “He had no intent that anybody would be harmed.”

But that didn’t matter to Vigeant’s jury, which didn’t need to find intent to kill to convict him under the felony murder rule. Vigeant was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, and he’s now in a prison near Sacramento.

Vigeant’s story is one of many illustrating the most controversial features of the doctrine: A person can be convicted of first-degree murder based not on whether they killed or intended to kill, but on their participation in a felony where a death occurs.

Felony murder exists in 48 states; only Kentucky and Hawaii have abolished it.

Adopted in various forms across the United States with deep roots in Anglo-American common law, felony murder has long allowed prosecutors to pursue murder charges against accomplices, getaway drivers and others tied to underlying crimes.

Vigeant’s case sits at the center of a debate that is playing out in courts, legislatures and advocacy campaigns nationwide as states reconsider how far liability for a killing should extend.

Supporters say the rule holds people accountable for the risks they create when engaging in crimes that can be expected to turn violent and potentially deadly.

In a seminal 1985 article published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy titled “In Defense of the Felony Murder Doctrine,” legal scholars David Crump and Susan Waite Crump argued the doctrine promotes rational grading of crimes, reinforces moral norms, deters dangerous conduct, clarifies legal standards, conserves judicial resources and limits incentives for perjury.

“The felony murder rule is just the sort of simple, commonsense, readily enforceable, and widely known principle that is likely to result in deterrence,” the Crumps wrote in the paper.

Since then, many scholars have challenged those assumptions, arguing the doctrine collapses intent and responsibility and exposes people who did not plan or commit a killing to the harshest penalties in criminal law.

A Rule Built on Risk, Not Intent

Jurisdictions apply the felony murder doctrine in different ways, but the underlying theory remains consistent: People who jointly participate in dangerous crimes assume the risk that violence may follow.

Prosecutors don’t have to prove that a defendant intended to kill during the course of a felony, only that the defendant had the required mental state for the felony itself. Under the rule, people who participate in a felony can be held liable for murder if a death is considered a foreseeable outcome of that crime.

In some states, prosecutors must show that a defendant knew that violence was likely. In others, the threshold is broader, attaching murder liability when a death occurs during the felony regardless of whether the defendant had a guilty state of mind, referred to in law as mens rea, toward the killing itself.

Mens rea is one of the necessary elements prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt to secure a criminal conviction.

The felony murder rule alters that paradigm.

“Every crime is basically a physical act and a mental state. If you don’t have the appropriate mental state, you’re not really guilty,” said Hermann Walz, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and longtime former prosecutor and defense attorney.

Walz said the doctrine reframes mens rea, shifting from asking what a defendant intended to happen to what they knew could happen.

“I think there’s logic to it,” he said, using the example of a hypothetical armed robbery. “If you put yourself in a position of possible trouble and it happens, then who’s to blame?”

Other defense attorneys disagree.

Tess Cohen, of ZMO Law PLLC and a former prosecutor who chairs the New York City Bar Association’s Mass Incarceration Task Force, said the doctrine bypasses one of criminal law’s core principles: the need for intent.

“Especially when we impose mandatory sentences on people without a mens rea, you have a real, real problem,” Cohen said. “A judge can’t weigh the factors involved, whether it’s reasonable for you to have understood that someone could really get seriously injured.”

Cohen said sentencing schemes in state laws already allow for defendants to be held responsible for actions they commit that have larger consequences than intended.

In New York, for example, a person convicted of robbery in the first degree can be sentenced to a minimum of five years and a maximum of 25. If the robbery resulted in someone’s death and the defendant did not cause the killing, a judge could consider a sentence near or at the high end of that range. A murder conviction under the felony murder rule, on the other hand, could lead to a 15-to-life sentence.

“It creates a large opportunity for injustice and unfair sentences to occur where the facts and the sentence aren’t aligned with each other, because felony murder encompasses such a huge range of accidental and purposeful actions,” Cohen said. “There are some people where you could justify these sentences, for sure. But there are other people where you can’t.”

A major legal challenge now before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court could reshape how felony murder is punished in the state as the justices weigh whether mandatory life-without-parole sentences for felony murder violate constitutional protections.

Nazgol Ghandnoosh, a senior researcher at The Sentencing Project, said the doctrine’s reach is often misunderstood because the term “felony murder” collapses different levels of culpability into a single category. The doctrine, she said, flies in the face of the concept of proportionality between a crime and its punishment.

“We have a sort of principle in criminal sentencing that if you’ve done a worse thing, you should be punished more severely,” she said. “But with felony murder laws, you end up having sometimes people serving some of the most extreme sentences, and their offense is not the worst offenses that are out there.”

According to a survey by The Sentencing Project, nine states and the federal system make sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole, or LWOP, mandatory for all adult felony murder convictions, and 15 states make them mandatory in some cases. LWOP is available as an option in felony murder convictions in 16 states and the District of Columbia. Several states allow or require terms of 50 years in prison, sentences known as “virtual life.”

California has the highest share in the U.S. of felony murder convictions among those serving life sentences — nearly half.

Combined with minimum sentences, felony murder charges become a powerful, sometimes coercive tool for prosecutors to dissuade defendants from seeking jury trials, to which they are entitled under the U.S. Constitution, a phenomenon known as the trial penalty.

“People take terrible plea deals because of the threat of the life-without-parole sentence that can come with a felony murder conviction,” Ghandnoosh said.

Who the Doctrine Affects Most

Legal experts say the effect of the felony murder rule is not evenly distributed. In practice, the doctrine most often reaches people who are young, involved in group crimes and prosecuted in jurisdictions where the law is applied aggressively.

Researchers say the structure of felony murder makes it especially likely to entangle younger defendants, who are statistically more likely to act in groups and to be influenced by peers.

“The way that felony murder makes it so that anybody who’s an accomplice to the underlying offense can be held liable for murder tends to bring in a large group of young people to face the kinds of extreme sentencing that felony murder can result in,” Ghandnoosh said.

Those dynamics intersect with broader disparities in the criminal legal system. Studies and incarceration data show felony murder charges disproportionately affect people of color, particularly in communities that already experience higher levels of policing and prosecution. While national data isn’t available, individual states’ statistics show bias in the doctrine’s application.

In Pennsylvania in 2020, four out of five incarcerated people with a felony murder conviction were people of color, and 70% were Black, according to a report published by The Sentencing Project in 2022 and updated two years later. And in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, eight out of 10 people sentenced under the felony murder rule between 2010 and 2020 were Black, according to the same report, which cites academic studies.

Advocates say the doctrine also captures people whose involvement in crimes was shaped by coercion or survival, including women dealing with abusive partners and people drawn into offenses by dominant co-defendants.

“When you have a woman whose partner is abusive, who while under duress is helping her partner commit a robbery or other kind of felony that leads to someone’s death, automatically, that leads to a felony murder sentence,” Ghandnoosh said. “It doesn’t matter that she was in an abusive situation, that she was helping under duress. Those things end up not mattering at all when we have mandatory sentencing laws.”

Because felony murder statutes and charging practices vary widely from state to state, and even county to county, outcomes can depend heavily on geography. Some jurisdictions pursue the doctrine aggressively, as others reserve it for the most serious cases or limit its reach through statute and policy.

James Swansey, a formerly incarcerated advocate who now works with people serving long sentences, said those differences can determine whether a defendant is charged with robbery or murder for the same underlying conduct.

“This rule just allows for the state’s attorneys to charge individuals and ultimately give them a lot of time,” said Swansey, a policy advocate at Restore Justice, a Chicago-based criminal justice advocacy organization. “We want people to be held responsible for what it is that they actually did.”

California As Blueprint for Limiting the Doctrine

In the years since her son’s conviction, Scheer has advocated for criminal justice reform, becoming one of the faces of a nationwide grassroots movement seeking to limit or abolish felony murder in various states.

She founded the Felony Murder Elimination Project, a nonprofit that seeks to abolish the doctrine and connect people who have been affected by it.

In 2018, after years of advocacy by a coalition of organizations that included Scheer’s, California enacted legislation — Senate Bill 1437 — that restricted murder liability to those who actually killed, had intent to kill who were a major participant in a felony and acted with “reckless indifference to human life,” a concept known in law as “depravity.”

People who were convicted under the felony murder rule but did not fit those categories could ask courts to be resentenced. As of December 2024, nearly 1,200 people convicted under felony murder had their charges vacated and were resentenced in California. About 78% of those resentenced have been released from prison.

Josh Pynoos worked on S.B. 1437 as an advocacy and communications strategist with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, a California-based organization that seeks to end mass incarceration. He said the law has succeeded in giving people sentenced to long prison terms, many of them as teenagers or young adults, a chance to reenter society.

Ghandnoosh said the California law is a national template. Although it applies only to people charged with felony murder as accomplices, the law has a wide reach: It applies to people who were charged with felony murder and convicted as well as those who took pleas to lesser offenses.

“That really broadens the number of people that are eligible for sentencing relief,” she said

In recent years, other states have sought to pass legislation curbing the reach of the doctrine by limiting accomplice liability, a theory of prosecution that makes people accessory to a crime liable for the results of someone else’s action, including death.

In most states, legislatures decide which crimes are serious enough to support felony murder liability, typically through enumerated lists of predicate felonies. Only a smaller set of jurisdictions — including Minnesota, Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas — continue to rely heavily on “dangerous felony” standards that are less legally defined.

A way to limit the effect of felony murder doctrine is to curb its applicability. In some states, a person carrying out a felony that results in the killing of a co-defendant can be held liable for the death. In others, the liability extends to people who are killed by police officers responding to the felony.

On the other hand, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon and Washington state can only charge the actual perpetrators of the killing with felony murder.

The felony murder rule’s reach also can be limited by keeping its application to a determined list of underlying felony charges. In some states, a felony murder charge can be attached only to burglary, arson, robbery, kidnapping, escape from prison and rape.

In 2024, a Minnesota Department of Corrections task force produced a report calling on the state legislature to codify a list of specific felonies that would trigger charges of felony murder in the second degree. Those efforts are still underway.

And on Jan. 21, a New York legislator introduced Senate Bill S8464A, which seeks to repeal felony murder entirely and make people sentenced under the rule eligible for resentencing and vacatur of convictions.

“Evidence from other states indicates that as many as one in five individuals serving prison sentences for murder have been convicted based on the felony murder doctrine,” the introductory section of the bill’s text reads. “Studies have also found that prosecutors use the threat of felony murder charges to obtain plea deals for lengthy sentences, demonstrating felony murder doctrine’s role in extreme sentencing and mass incarceration.”

The Deterrence Debate

Supporters of felony murder often defend the rule as a tool meant to change behavior before violence happens. Some legal scholars say the doctrine deters would-be offenders from committing felonies, introducing weapons in risky situations, or participating in group crimes likely to escalate.

From that perspective, the rule’s collective liability feature is not an accident but the actual mechanism.

Guyora Binder, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School who has written extensively on the subject, argued in papers that the rule has a coherent moral foundation when applied to inherently dangerous crimes.

“The felon’s additional depraved purpose aggravates his culpability for causing death carelessly,” Binder wrote in a 2008 paper published in the Notre Dame Law Review. “To impose a foreseeable risk of death for such a purpose deserves severe punishment because it expresses a commitment to particularly reprehensible values.”

Binder argued in later scholarship that the doctrine should be limited to cases involving defendants’ actual culpability and a foreseeable risk of death surrounding their actions.

In a paper he wrote with fellow Buffalo scholar Alexandra Harrington that was published in March 2025 in the Iowa Law Review, Binder provided an empirical critique of how the felony murder doctrine operates in practice, making a case for reforming it.

In the paper, which examined all New York cases in which felony murder was the only charge to reach a final disposition between 2008 and 2021, Binder found that about half of those convicted were accomplices who did not kill anyone and that many of the killers caused death inadvertently.

The study also showed strong racial disparities in felony murder arrests and convictions. Black people were about 21 times more likely than white people to be convicted. Latinos were found to be more than six times as likely to be convicted.

In a call with Law360, Binder said a “reasonable argument” could be made for punishing severely those who kill negligently in the course of serious felonies. Binder said it is “sensible” to view the creation of risk of death while committing serious offenses — robbery, rape or arson for example — as a factor that increases a defendant’s guilt.

“I don’t think that felony murder laws are crazy. Personally, I don’t think they’re necessary,” he said. “I don’t think that negligently killing in the course of a serious crime merits murder liability, and certainly doesn’t merit the kind of very severe punishment that we impose in our society for murder.”

He explained that New York’s existing homicide framework can handle killings that occur during serious felonies, for example by imposing harsher penalties based on the level of intent.

And while the most common rationale supporting felony murder is deterring violence during dangerous crimes, defense attorneys and reform advocates say the deterrence rationale breaks down in the real world, especially in the cases the doctrine is most often used to prosecute.

Cohen of ZMO Law said that even if legislators or prosecutors were to describe the rule as a warning to potential criminals, that message is unlikely to shape their decisions in the moment. People tend not to think about the consequences of their actions, even when these might lead to someone’s death, she said.

“I very much doubt that many, if any, of them are thinking through, ‘OK, if someone dies, then the sentence is going to be higher,'” Cohen said. “Studies show that the biggest deterrent effect is actually the likelihood of being caught, not the length of sentence.”

–Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.

Have a story idea for Access to Justice? Reach us at accesstojustice@law360.com.