Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Abstract
Two long criticized prosecutorial tools—the felony murder rule and the accomplice liability doctrine—play an outsized role in the operation of American homicide law. Though each of these tools have separately faced intense criticism for their resistance to the supposedly foundational principles of moral culpability and individual responsibility, their legacy is also defined by the way they function symbiotically and specifically to heighten racialized punishment. This Article addresses the weighty combined reach of the accomplice liability doctrine and felony murder rule, and proposes that racial bias has fueled the operation and survival of these tools. Specifically, it suggests that implicit racial bias has led to the automatic individualization of white men who are involved in group crimes, while at the same time created automatic deindividualization for Black and Latino men in similar situations, rendering these two doctrines complicit in state sanctioned racialization. This Article hypothesizes that the phenomena of implicit racial bias and white individualization sustain the felony murder rule and accomplice liability doctrine, avoiding legislative and judicial responsibility to constrain the unfair expansion of criminal liability. A national empirical study conducted by the authors supports the claim of racialized group liability within the felony murder rule by demonstrating that Americans automatically individualize white men, yet automatically perceive Black and Latino men as group members. In addition to this core finding, the study also shows that mock jurors disproportionately penalized men with Latino-sounding names compared to men with white or Black-sounding names, ascribing to Latino men the highest levels of intentionality and criminal responsibility in a group robbery resulting in a homicide. Contextualized within the troubled history of the felony murder rule and accomplice liability doctrine, the Article concludes by calling for the abandonment of the felony murder rule in group liability situations.
Publication Title
Denver L. Rev.
Volume
101
First Page
65
Recommended Citation
Cohen, G. Ben; Levinson, Justin D.; and Hioki, Koichi, "Racial Bias, Accomplice Liability, and The Felony Murder Rule: A National Empirical Study" (2024). Akron Law Faculty Publications. 245.
https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/ua_law_publications/245