Looks like local authorities are going to do all they can to charge Christopher Jones with the deaths of the news crews in those two Phoenix helicopters.

A defense attorney in Arizona writes:

I don’t know if you’ve looked into it at all, but ARS 13-1105, Arizona’s first degree murder statute, is so broad it’s almost laughable. Section (A)(2) contains our version of felony-murder, and it includes “unlawful flight from a pursuing law enforcement vehicle under section 28-622.01″ as one of the underlying felonies that can support felony-murder. All ARS 28-622.01 requires is that Jones willfully fled or attempted to elude a marked law enforcement vehicle using sirens/lights. That seems like a no-brainer in his case.

Because Jones committed one of the listed crimes, it will be first degree murder if “in the course of and in furtherance of the offense or immediate flight from the offense, [Jones] or another person causes the death of any person.” Again, he easily satisfies the statute; it’s hard not to. A prosecutor could even make a strong argument for heaping on another charge if your heart attack hypothetical happened to be true. The statute absolutely does not care whether or not the death was foreseeable. It doesn’t even care who causes the death.

I know you aren’t a fan of felony murder to begin with, and Arizona’s version is about as bad as they get.

The article linked above indicates local prosecutors are bit more skeptical of the possibility, though they’re clearing trying to figure out a way to make it happen.

Again, Jones is not a sympathetic figure, here. But he also isn’t a murderer. And this ever-broadening scope of felony murder gets all the more disturbing when you consider the ever-lengthening list of what constitutes a felony.

I go back to a drug raid in Macon, Georgia last year for an example. Deputy Joseph Whitehead was shot and killed when police raided a house occupied by four people, where there does appear to have been some drug activity. The two men who shot Whitehead claim they thought the police were a gang or rival drug dealers, and they’re supported by witnesses at the scene. But the prosecutor not only charged the two gunmen with murder, he charged another person in the house who had nothing to do with the shooting, and yet another who was listed as a resident of the house but wasn’t even home at the time of the raid, under a theory of felony murder that he lived in a house where felony drug crimes were being committed, which led to the police raid, which led to the shooting of Dep. Whitehead.

The charges against the guy who wasn’t home were eventually thrown out. But it’s a bad sign that a prosecutor would make such a tenuous connection in the first place.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 9:30 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.