Yahoo · https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/39-states-people-sentenced-life-203539968.html
The driver gets a murder charge; the shooter pleads down and walks. Almost every state lets one man's killing land on another man's neck.
The soul who sins, he shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.
Ezekiel 18:20
On July 24, 2026, Reason ran the arithmetic: in 39 states, a person can be sentenced to life for a killing he did not commit. A report from The Sentencing Project the same month named the mechanism. It is called felony murder. When someone dies during a crime like a robbery, everyone involved can be charged with that death, whether or not they touched the victim, wanted anyone to die, or ever saw it coming. Only Hawaii and Kentucky reject the rule outright.
The strange part is who pays most. The one who fired the shot can often plead to a lesser charge and testify against the rest. The lookout, the driver, the teenager holding the bag is charged with the murder instead. Jamie Meade was nineteen when his partner pulled the trigger during a robbery. The shooter walked free in ten years. Meade served thirty-one before the state commuted his sentence.
Watch what that does to guilt. It becomes portable. It lifts off the hand that fired and settles on whoever stood closest.
Ezekiel argued against exactly this. His people had a saying: the parents eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth go numb. They took it to mean that guilt runs down the family line, from parent to child. He threw the saying out. Guilt belongs to the person who earns it, he said, and it dies with that person.
It does not pass down to a child. And it does not pass sideways to whoever shared the room. That is the point felony murder surrenders. Meade never fired the shot. The law handed him the shooter's guilt anyway.
Reason is a libertarian magazine. The Sentencing Project is a progressive reform group. They start far apart, and on this they stand together. A punishment is landing on someone other than the person who earned it, and both of them can see it.
Ezekiel said it in exile, twenty-six centuries ago. Guilt dies with the one who did the deed. Forty-eight states keep a rule where it travels instead, where a death can be charged to the man standing nearest to it. Meade stood near it for thirty-one years.