Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away
Dianne Tramutola-lLawson
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2023 7:41 PM
To: "CELWOP-BOARD" <celwop...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Fwd: Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away
latest book, Boy With A Knife (April 2016)
Prof. Emerita MCC
(c)508-254-2131 jeantrounstine.com
This week: the best TV of 2023; the Holocaust and the politics of memory; and inside the illegal cactus trade. To jump to a complete list of what’s in the latest issue, click here.
A Reporter at Large
What Makes a Murder?
Reporter’s Notebook
The staff writer Sarah Stillman discusses her ongoing reporting project on felony-murder convictions in the United States.
When a friend first told me about Ian Marcus Amelkin, several years ago, I couldn’t stop thinking about his story. When he was just nine days old, Ian lost his father to an accident with a reckless driver. Eventually, Ian’s mom got remarried to a man named Dean, who became Ian’s second dad. Three decades later, when Ian was living as a lawyer in Brooklyn, he got the news that Dean, too, had been fatally struck by a reckless driver, while biking in South Florida. Soon afterward, he got another shock: two men were being charged with first-degree murder in his father’s death, as well as the death of another biker.
The backstory of those murder charges became, for me, the focal point of a two-year investigative-reporting journey. One of the men being charged with murder in Dean Amelkin’s death—a twenty-five-year-old named Sadik Baxter—had not been present at the scene of the accident. He’d been stealing loose change from an unlocked car when the car’s owner had called the police. Baxter was promptly arrested, handcuffed, and loaded into a deputy’s vehicle. Earlier, his friend O’Brian Oakley had taken off from the scene in his car and, under pursuit from law enforcement, crashed—some eighteen minutes later—into the two bicyclists, killing them. Both Baxter and Oakley were convicted of first-degree murder in Florida, and sentenced to mandatory life in prison without parole.
How could this be? The answer was something called the felony-murder doctrine, a widely used but poorly understood legal tool that accounts for thousands of extreme sentences around the country. In many states, it allows for people who’ve never killed another person, nor intended any death to occur, to be charged with murder if they were present for, or connected to, a certain type of felony in which someone died. All around the country, I found, people are being locked up—often, for life—for murders that even the court agrees they did not commit.
I encountered a lot of surprises along the reporting path. One was the growing momentum of groups around the country seeking to reform or abolish the felony-murder rule—many of them led by incarcerated people and their loved ones. Another was the near-complete lack of transparency in most states around the doctrine’s use. Naïvely, I thought I could file public-records requests with my students at the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab, to discover the total number of people locked up for felony murder in the U.S. Instead, we got back rejection after rejection; most states don’t keep proper data on who gets locked up for this category of conviction. Thus began a two-year collaboration attempting to get a better picture of nationwide felony-murder data. I teamed up with my students, law-school clinics, data analysts, and legal experts at the nonprofit Zealous to try every strategy we could to crack the numbers. What we found shocked even many of the jaded public defenders with whom we shared it: the racial and age disparities among felony-murder convictions are stark, even when compared with already disproportionate rates of incarceration over all.
Meanwhile, our work continues: we’ve set up an independent Web site, the Felony Murder Reporting Project, to share our preliminary findings, foster local data reporting, and keep digging for more cases.
More from the Issue
Cover Story: The artist Olimpia Zagnoli discusses “Let There Be Lights,” and the importance of strands of brilliance amid dark days. “We’re going to need some very bright light bulbs to lighten up this moment,” she says. Shop all our covers »
Cancer’s Hidden Catalysts: We routinely test for chemicals that cause mutations. What about the substances that don’t create cancer cells but rouse them from their slumber? Siddhartha Mukherjee on a new framework for finding carcinogens.
A Street Artist’s Global Ambitions: Invader has sneaked ten pieces into the Louvre and sent pieces into space. Lauren Collins on what the mosaic artist wants to do next.
Plus: David Remnick on the threats of a Trump dictatorship; Adam Gopnik on what we want from comedy; and more.
The Year in Review
In Case You Missed It
Highlights from our top stories this week.
1. “That the Holocaust happened meant that it was possible—and remains possible.” Masha Gessen writes about how the politics of memory obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today.
2. The Terrible Twenties? The Age of Emergency? The Assholocene? Kyle Chayka on what to call our chaotic era.
3. Outside a prison in the West Bank where detained Palestinians were released, there were scenes of celebration and chaos. Anand Gopal on the Israel-Hamas prisoner swap.
4. Todd Haynes’s new film, “May December,” probes the dark assumptions behind a tabloid scandal. E. Tammy Kim on how race and class shaped the real-world case of sexual exploitation that inspired it.
5. “One night in 2007, two men went into Saguaro National Park, outside Tucson, and made off with seventeen of the cacti.” Rivka Galchen describes how the succulent craze has sparked a robust illegal economy.
“Just wave your watch over the screen for a while, then audibly sigh and swipe your credit card.”
Quote of the Week
“Just walking from my car to the gig, let alone doing a whole performance in someone’s driveway—we don’t even feel safe doing that.”
Podcasts
The Political Scene: Former Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee joins Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos to discuss the rush of Republican lawmakers leaving Congress and what’s driving them away. Listen and follow »
Critics at Large: Hayao Miyazaki, the filmmaker behind “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away,” is renowned for stories about resourceful children navigating surreal circumstances. In “The Boy and the Heron,” the eighty-two-year-old makes a rare return to his own youth. Listen and follow »
Screening Room
The New Yorker Documentary
The Euphoria of Cold-Water Immersion in “Swimming Through”
P.S. “I cannot truly get into the holiday spirit until I hear the dulcet tones of the song’s glockenspiel intro.” For Goings On, Rachel Syme writes about Mariah Carey’s 1994 holiday bop “All I Want for Christmas Is You” being selected for preservation by the Library of Congress.
Thanks for reading.
Let us know your thoughts about today’s edition. Plus, browse more newsletters and invite a friend to sign up for the weekly newsletter.
You’re receiving this e-mail because you signed up for the weekly newsletter from The New Yorker.
Manage your preferences | View our Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe
The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from the products and services that are purchased through links in our newsletters as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers.
Copyright © Condé Nast 2023. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CELWOP-BOARD" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to celwop-board...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/celwop-board/CA%2B_Fe7RbYSiw6e6eou_TUbx47KxiBaOJFNHN%3Dnus%3D6gGXaN4-Q%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.