Amicus Brief Challenging Mandatory Life Without Parole for Felony Murder in Florida

The Sentencing Project joined an amicus brief urging the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to find Florida’s law imposing mandatory life without parole for felony murder on an individual who neither caused nor intended to cause a death unconstitutional.

Florida’s first degree felony murder law is among the most draconian of all felony murder laws in the country. Florida imposes a mandatory minimum sentence of life without parole for so-called “strict-liability” first degree felony murder—meaning felony murder that requires no mens rea related to the death. The result is that a person can be automatically condemned to die in prison even if they did not kill anyone, intend to kill anyone, participate in a murder, or even foresee the possibility of death. The Sentencing Project joined an amicus brief urging the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to find Florida’s law unconstitutional.

Read the brief in Baxter v. Florida Department of Corrections here.