Blake Layman made one very bad decision. He was 16, an unexceptional teenager growing up in a small Indiana town. He’d never been in trouble with the law, had a clean criminal record, had never owned or even held a gun.

That decision sparked a chain of events that would culminate with his arrest and trial for “felony murder”. The boy was unarmed, had pulled no trigger, killed no one. He was himself shot and injured in the incident while his friend standing beside him was also shot and killed. Yet Layman would go on to be found guilty by a jury of his peers and sentenced to 55 years in a maximum-security prison for a shooting that he did not carry out...

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...The legal anomaly at the heart of what has become known in criminal justice circles as the case of the “Elkhart 4” will be the subject on Thursday of a special hearing by the Indiana supreme court, the state’s highest legal panel. The judges have asked lawyers for Layman and for the prosecution to address that specific question: is it consistent with Indiana law that he and his friends who were all unarmed, who fired not a single shot, and who in fact were themselves fired upon, one fatally, by a third party – the homeowner Rodney Scott – could be put away for decades for murder?

The conundrum is not an arcane one. Some 46 states in the union have some form of felony murder rule on their statute books. Of those, 11 states unambiguously allow for individuals who commit a felony that ends in a death to be charged with murder even when they were the victims, rather than the agents, of the killing.

In Indiana the wording of the felony murder law is more nuanced than those of the other 11 states. It says that a “person who kills another human being while committing or attempting to commit … burglary … commits murder, a felony.”

Soi Dog wrote:The US has so many people incarcerated because they effectively and actively enforce laws and punish criminals. When you commit a crime your are held responsible for all the subsequent actions of your decision to commit that crime and those of any accomplices, whether those subsequent actions were in your control or not. People are held to account and punished for their actions and all effects of those actions.

The same people who constantly bemoan the US for such stances on crime are the same ones who complain that the Cambodian justice system is ineffective and doesn't hold people to account.

MekongMouse wrote:

Soi Dog wrote:The US has so many people incarcerated because they effectively and actively enforce laws and punish criminals. When you commit a crime your are held responsible for all the subsequent actions of your decision to commit that crime and those of any accomplices, whether those subsequent actions were in your control or not. People are held to account and punished for their actions and all effects of those actions.

The same people who constantly bemoan the US for such stances on crime are the same ones who complain that the Cambodian justice system is ineffective and doesn't hold people to account.

There's a middle ground though, right? You think it is fair that he be held responsible for his friend's death when he didn't shoot him? He committed burglary, not murder. Nobody needed to be charged in his friend's death. If the law considers the man who defended his property innocent, then that is it; it ends there.