The Murder Rule(16)

“You can send it to me.” Parekh glanced at his watch. “You know what? I’ve got a few minutes. Why don’t you come by now and run through what you have so far?”

“Great,” Hannah said. “I’l just print out my notes.”

Parekh left for his office and Hannah printed her document. She was conscious of Rachel, sitting to her right, quivering in outrage.

Rachel’s head was stil bent to her work, but she had two spots of color high in her cheeks and her hand was clenched around her pen.

“You’re a fast mover, aren’t you?” she said in a sharp whisper.

Hannah said nothing.

“I told you yesterday that our recommendations go to the staff attorneys for review,” Rachel said.

“This is a good case,” Hannah said. “I don’t want it to get lost.”

“Sure,” Rachel said. “You’re just thinking about the applicant, right?”

“That’s what I’m here for.” Hannah picked up her notebook and pen and made for Parekh’s office, stopping only to col ect her notes from the printer. She paused as she entered his office.

“Door open, or closed?” she asked.

“Open is fine,” he said. “Take a seat.”

Hannah sat in one of the seats in front of his desk and, conscious that they could be interrupted at any time, launched into her pitch without any preamble.

“The applicant’s name is Nia Jones. In 1994 she was twenty-two years old and living in a trailer in a park outside Richmond with her children—a six-month-old baby boy named Andre, and a two-year-old little girl named Carly-Anne. At approximately ten-thirty P.M. on a Friday night in October, the trailer caught fire. The fire started in the kitchen area. Nia was asleep in the bedroom with the baby, and Carly-Anne was asleep too.” Hannah looked up. “Carly-Anne slept in the living room. The couch there converted into a bed at night, but that meant that she was caught on the other side of the fire from Nia and Andre.” Parekh nodded, and Hannah looked back at her notes.

“Nia managed to get outside with the baby, and witnesses say that she went straight around to the side of the home and broke the window. The window was high up off the ground . . .” Hannah put her papers down and demonstrated with her hands. “It would have been above head height for Nia, who is only five foot two. But she broke the window and managed to climb halfway inside before the fire drove her back. She had deep lacerations to both hands and second-degree burns to her face and upper body.”

“The little girl didn’t make it,” Parekh said.

Hannah shook her head.

“And Nia was charged.”

“Yes. With arson and felony murder. I’ve looked at the reporting around the case. There’s a strong streak of prejudice running through everything. Lots of talk about how she was a single mother of two. Lots of references to previous arrests for drug offenses at the trailer park, though there’s nothing to suggest that Nia had any drug history. Her sister tel s me that she had no history with the police at al , that she was a good mother who loved her children and was doing her best. No drugs, no alcohol abuse.”

Hannah would never deny that there were innocent people in prison. She had, however, been a little taken aback by how easy it had been to find a case that seemed to be such an obvious case of wrongful conviction. Was that just luck? Or were they real y stacked up, ten deep?

“You said felony murder?” Parekh asked, brow furrowed.

“Yes.”

“Anything in that we can use?”

Hannah shook her head. “I don’t think so.” Felony murder charges could be controversial. It was a basic legal principle that to be convicted of a crime an offender must have both committed the crime and had the intention of committing it. The felony murder rule was an exception to that principle, and it had, on more than one occasion, resulted in convictions that most people would consider to be unjust. Under the murder rule, when an offender accidental y kil s someone while in the process of committing another serious crime, like arson, rape, or burglary, the offender can be charged with first-degree murder. But it goes further than that. In some circumstances, the kil er’s accomplices in the original crime can be found guilty of murder too, even if they weren’t physical y present when the death took place. Hannah had read about a case where a burglar was already in handcuffs in a police car when her accomplice in an earlier burglary shot a police officer. The burglar in handcuffs was found guilty of felony murder. There was another case where a twenty-year-old loaned a car to a friend. The friend used that car to travel to commit a burglary, and during the burglary, he beat a young woman to death. The twenty-year-old was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to life without parole. The prosecution had argued that the twenty-year-old knew that his friend was planning a burglary, but it didn’t seem likely that he could have known that the murder, which had been spontaneous, would take place.

Hannah could see that the murder rule was problematic, but she wasn’t sure she agreed with critics who said it should be removed entirely. For her, it was a question of moderation, rather than complete removal. Virginia had added a requirement that the murder result directly from the offender’s own acts, rather than those of an accomplice, and that felt like a reasonable approach. If Nia Jones had intentional y set fire to her own trailer and her baby’s death had been the accidental result, Hannah would have wanted to see Nia punished. So Hannah’s problem with Nia’s conviction wasn’t that it resulted from a charge of felony murder. The problem was, as far as Hannah could see, that there was no evidence that she had committed any crime at al .