LaKeith Smith was 15 when, in February 2015, he and several friends burgled two homes in Millbrook, Alabama. When police arrived, some of Smith’s friends, including 16-year-old A’Donte Washington, engaged in gunfire with the police officers, and one of the officers shot and killed Washington. Now Smith has been charged and convicted of Washington’s murder even though Smith himself did not participate in the shootout (he did not even have a gun). In April 2018 a judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison for Washington’s death, plus an additional 35 years for two counts of theft and one count of burglary.

The case is worrisome for a host of reasons. We might reasonably object to sentencing a person to 65 years in prison for crimes that occurred when he was 15 years old. We might also object that the 35-year prison term for the burglaries themselves is a disproportionately harsh sentence. And we might worry about the role played by plea deals in this case. Smith went to trial after refusing a prosecutor’s plea deal of 25 years (his surviving accomplices took deals). Plea deals account for more than 90 percent of federal and state-level criminal convictions in the United States. In a context in which such deals are ubiquitous, they begin to look less like plea offers and more like trial threats (‘take the deal or you may face a much more severe punishment’). As Smith discovered, the cost of turning down a plea deal can be severe.

Clearly, though, the most troubling aspect of this case is that Smith was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison for a murder he did not actually commit. Smith was convicted under Alabama’s felony-murder law, which allows a person involved in a felony that results in a death to be charged with murder even if someone else was responsible for the death. Many US states have felony-murder laws, and they are typically used to hold members of a criminal group responsible for deaths caused by others in the group.

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"Respecting people as autonomous moral agents seems at least to require that our treatment of them be responsive to choices they’ve actually made."

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Smith’s case was unusual in that his friend Washington was killed by a police officer, yet Smith was punished for the killing. Even more bizarre was the fact that, because the police shooting was found to be justified, there was by definition no murder (which is, in legal terms, ‘the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought’), and yet Smith was convicted and sentenced for felony-murder.

Advocates of the felony-murder law claim that the law helps reduce serious harms because it discourages offenders from using unnecessary force during the course of their crimes. However, there’s no clear evidence that the felony-murder law actually helps to reduce harms in this way. But even if the law served this purpose, it rests on shaky ethical ground.