| The staff writer Sarah Stillman discusses her ongoing reporting project on felony-murder convictions in the United States. When a friend first told me about Ian Marcus Amelkin, several years ago, I couldn’t stop thinking about his story. When he was just nine days old, Ian lost his father to an accident with a reckless driver. Eventually, Ian’s mom got remarried to a man named Dean, who became Ian’s second dad. Three decades later, when Ian was living as a lawyer in Brooklyn, he got the news that Dean, too, had been fatally struck by a reckless driver, while biking in South Florida. Soon afterward, he got another shock: two men were being charged with first-degree murder in his father’s death, as well as the death of another biker. The backstory of those murder charges became, for me, the focal point of a two-year investigative-reporting journey. One of the men being charged with murder in Dean Amelkin’s death—a twenty-five-year-old named Sadik Baxter—had not been present at the scene of the accident. He’d been stealing loose change from an unlocked car when the car’s owner had called the police. Baxter was promptly arrested, handcuffed, and loaded into a deputy’s vehicle. Earlier, his friend O’Brian Oakley had taken off from the scene in his car and, under pursuit from law enforcement, crashed—some eighteen minutes later—into the two bicyclists, killing them. Both Baxter and Oakley were convicted of first-degree murder in Florida, and sentenced to mandatory life in prison without parole. How could this be? The answer was something called the felony-murder doctrine, a widely used but poorly understood legal tool that accounts for thousands of extreme sentences around the country. In many states, it allows for people who’ve never killed another person, nor intended any death to occur, to be charged with murder if they were present for, or connected to, a certain type of felony in which someone died. All around the country, I found, people are being locked up—often, for life—for murders that even the court agrees they did not commit. I encountered a lot of surprises along the reporting path. One was the growing momentum of groups around the country seeking to reform or abolish the felony-murder rule—many of them led by incarcerated people and their loved ones. Another was the near-complete lack of transparency in most states around the doctrine’s use. Naïvely, I thought I could file public-records requests with my students at the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab, to discover the total number of people locked up for felony murder in the U.S. Instead, we got back rejection after rejection; most states don’t keep proper data on who gets locked up for this category of conviction. Thus began a two-year collaboration attempting to get a better picture of nationwide felony-murder data. I teamed up with my students, law-school clinics, data analysts, and legal experts at the nonprofit Zealous to try every strategy we could to crack the numbers. What we found shocked even many of the jaded public defenders with whom we shared it: the racial and age disparities among felony-murder convictions are stark, even when compared with already disproportionate rates of incarceration over all. Meanwhile, our work continues: we’ve set up an independent Web site, the Felony Murder Reporting Project, to share our preliminary findings, foster local data reporting, and keep digging for more cases. | 
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