Racial Bias, Accomplice Liability, and the Felony Murder Rule: A National Empirical Study

Abstract

Inside the fraught history of American homicide law sit two long-criticized doctrines, felony murder and accomplice liability. Though each of these rules have separately faced intense criticism for their resistance to the supposedly foundational principles of moral culpability and individual responsibility, their legacy must also be defined by the way they function symbiotically and specifically to heighten racialized punishment. This Article addresses the weighty combined reach of the accomplice liability and felony murder doctrines and proposes that racial bias has fueled the operation and survival of the rules. Specifically, it suggests that implicit racial bias has led to the automatic individuation of white men who are involved in group crimes, while at the same time created automatic de-individuation for Black and Latino men in similar situations, rendering these two doctrines complicit in state sanctioned racialization. While legislative and judicial power exist to constrain regimes that unfairly expand criminal liability while ignoring criminal responsibility, the Article argues that the phenomenon of white individualization sustains these doctrines when they would otherwise have been discarded. A national empirical study the authors conducted supports the claim of racialized group liability in the felony murder rule, 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 found that mock jurors disproportionately penalized men with Latino-sounding names compared to men with white or Black-sounding names, ascribing to them the highest levels of intentionality and criminal responsibility in a group robbery and ensuing homicide. Contextualized within the troubled history of the felony murder and accomplice liability rules, the Article concludes by calling for the abandonment of the felony-murder doctrine in group liability situations.

Keywords: felony murder, accomplice liability, implicit bias, race discrimination