The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

"A 27-year-old woman was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison for leaving her newborn daughter in a Wal-Mart restroom last year," said the AP report about the Macon, GA trial. "The jury found [Amy] Shorter guilty of felony murder for causing the baby's death while committing first-degree cruelty to children."

There's little else in the article, although it does say that she left the baby in a restroom after giving birth - unexpectedly, since she didn't know she was pregnant - and then it died five days later. We are left to infer what action she actually took for which she was charged, but it seems reasonable to speculate that it may have simply been abandonment, or perhaps some sort of battery (although we are not given any specific information upon which to base that latter conclusion).

What's troubling about the situation though is that she was charged with felony murder for the death of the baby, as opposed to manslaughter or even murder itself. Regular murder generally requires an intent to cause a death. Felony murder is an equivalent murder charge in severity, but instead of requiring the intent to cause a particular death, it applies when there was intent to commit another felony that ended up resulting in that death. A typical example would be a bank robbery during which a bystander dies. The bank robber may not have intended to cause that death, but because he intended to commit the felony of bank robbery he is just as liable for the collateral death as if he had intended to cause it directly.

That's a much different situation than the case here. With the bank robbery example there is a separate criminal act apart from the act that specifically causes the death (e.g., a gun discharge). Here there is no separate criminal act. If the baby had died because she was robbing the Wal-Mart, the felony murder charge might have been appropriate, but here the only act in question was the one the woman took with respect to the baby. If the baby died as a result of her action she should be guilty of one of the bodily crimes, like murder. But if her action was not motivated by the requisite mens rea (intent) to qualify for murder, then she should not receive the punishment for murder. Now her actions might still have met the requirements for manslaughter (or similar crime as is defined in that jurisdiction), which is a lesser yet still serious charge. But in any case, the bodily injurious action she committed can only meet the legal culpability for one of the specific bodily crimes, and she should only receive a sentence commensurate with that level of charge.

The fact that she was not convicted of murder outright suggests that she was not deserving of such a charge. She may have deserved a manslaughter conviction of some sort, but that does not appear to be the charge the prosecutor sought. Rather, she did an end-run around the mens rea (intent) requirements of murder by treating her action as something much less severe than murder or manslaughter - charging her instead with "child cruelty" - and then, because it resulted in a death, using the fact that it was a felony to justify the felony murder charge.

This is an absurd result, because it treats a single action as if it were two, when it was only one and should have been judged as one. Either her action met the legal definition of murder or manslaughter, or it didn't. Felony murder is a legal tool to ensure that indifferent felons don't get away with the deaths that they cause through the commission of their other crimes. To use it instead to supplant the tiered system of bodily-crime charges in order to yield a sentence not otherwise deserved, as apparently was the case, seems manifestly unjust.

Edit: A slightly more detailed article. Which makes the felony murder conviction as a matter of law look even stranger. Then again, I don't know how Georgia criminal law is structured - does it not have a "manslaughter" or equivalent? Is "felony murder" the only way to punish such crimes that don't qualify for outright murder?