John Oliver took aim at felony murder charges and the “shocking” system that has led people to be incarcerated for a crime they didn’t technically commit.
On Last Week Tonight, Oliver joked that murder was “the thing that cats are constantly plotting” before moving on to the specific crime of felony murder.
To explain, that is when “felony plus a death equals a murder charge” but it happens even if you didn’t intend to kill anyone and you are not the one who did the killing.
“You don’t have to be an active participant in a killing to get charged,” he added.
As an example, he spoke about a man who lent his roommate his car keys and after the car was then used for a burglary in which someone died, he was given life in prison without parole for the crime of felony murder.
Oliver said that as it was easier to obtain a felony murder conviction than a standard first-degree murder charge, it has been used that much more and since 1985, 11 people have been executed as a result.
“We clearly shouldn’t be executing people for murder if they didn’t murder someone,” he said.
Oliver then went back to its origins, joking that “like so many horrid things in American culture, it actually came from England”, where it was ultimately abolished.
He said it could be used in the US in “an astonishingly broad array of circumstances” including defendants who have been doing drugs near friends who have overdosed.
It has been referred to as a quiet driver of mass incarceration as most people have never heard of it but it is often forced mostly young defendants into making difficult decisions over how to plead.
“Normally when people are forced to choose the least bad option they resign themselves to having lunch at a Cracker Barrel,” he joked.
Predictably, it’s applied disproportionately to non-white people such as in New York where accomplices who haven’t been charged with killing anyone directly are 34 times more likely to be Black.
It has also been called the quintessential juvenile crime as many of them are in their teens and 20s. Oliver said that there were many places one would expect to see a teen – “a high school, an Olivia Rodrigo concert, Matt Gaetz’s texting history” – but “it is shocking to see so many locked in prison for felony murder”.
The justification for felony murder is that it acts as a deterrent but studies have shown it does not deter or reduce risk of re-offence as it’s “hard for something to be a deterrent if no one knows about it”.
Oliver joked: “Think of felony murder laws like Apple TV shows. Sure, there are tons of them out there but most people have no fucking idea they exist.”
He said the “solution is actually pretty simple: just get rid of the felony murder charge” and added that while some states were trying to limit its usage and that some convictions had been overturned, the cases mostly involve white defendants.
“No one is arguing that people who commit a felony should go unpunished or that there shouldn’t be consequences if someone is killed but they should be punished for the crime they committed,” he said.
