Description
In reality, situations are not as simple as the above summary suggests. Not all felonies will apply in most jurisdictions. To "qualify" for felony murder, the underlying felony must present a foreseeable danger to life, and the link between the felony and the death must not be too remote. If the receiver of a forged check has a fatal allergic reaction to the ink, most courts will not hold the forger guilty of murder. Furthermore, the merger doctrine excludes felonies that are presupposed by a murder charge. For example, nearly all murders involve some type of assault, but so do many cases of manslaughter. To count any death that occurred during the course of an assault as felony murder would obliterate a distinction carefully set by the legislature; however, merger may not apply when an assault against one person results in the death of another.
To counter the common law style interpretations of what does and does not merge with murder (and thus what does not and does qualify for felony murder), many jurisdictions in the United States explicitly list what offenses qualify. The American Law Institute's Model Penal Code lists robbery, rape or forcible deviant sexual intercourse, arson, burglary, and felonious escape. Federal law specifies additional crimes, including terrorism, kidnapping, and carjacking.
There are two schools of thought concerning whose actions can cause the defendant to be guilty of felony murder. Jurisdictions that hold to the agency theory admit only deaths caused by the agents of the crime. Jurisdictions that use the proximate cause theory include any death, even if caused by a bystander or the police, provided that it meets one of several proximate cause tests to determine if the chain of events between the felony and the death was short enough to have legally caused the death.
Felony murder is typically the same grade of murder as premeditated murder. In many jurisdictions, felony murder is a crime for which the death penalty can be imposed, provided that the defendant himself killed, attempted to kill, or intended to kill. For example, three people conspired to commit armed robbery. Two of them went in to the house and committed the robbery, and in the process killed the occupants of the house. The third person sat outside in the getaway car, and he was later convicted of felony murder. But because he himself neither killed, attempted to kill, nor intended to kill, he cannot be executed even though he is guilty of felony murder.
Read more about this topic: Felony Murder Rule
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