Felony Murder Rule

Lisl Auman was handcuffed in the back of a police car in the parking lot of an apartment complex when skinhead Matthaeus Jaehnig, whom Auman had met that morning, murdered a police officer.

Denver's Westword newspaper provides a concise description of the scene:

Freeze this image in your mind.

It's the afternoon of November 12, 1997. Lisl Auman, 21 years old, is standing in front of a boxy condominium...Behind her is the hulking form of Matthaeus Jaehnig, struggling frantically with the lock on the condominium door. In front of Lisl are first two, then three police officers. She has her hands up. She is taking one, two hesitant steps forward.

In seconds she will be on the ground, hands behind her for the handcuffs, an officer's knee in her back, his voice in her ear, yelling, calling her a bitch. She will be bundled into a police car and driven a short way off in the condo parking lot.

Jaehnig, meanwhile, will have veered from the door, around a set of stairs--coming within a few feet of the officers--and into an alcove...There is no exit from it other than the stairs he has just passed or the locked doorway to a second condo.

Officer Bruce VanderJagt arrives...VanderJagt is a courageous and much-admired eleven-year veteran of the Denver Police Department. He has twice received a Distinguished Service Cross--once for disarming a gunman terrorizing the employees of Porter Memorial Hospital, once for running into a burning building to help save the occupants...VanderJagt peers around the corner. There's a fusillade of shots. More quickly than the mind can grasp, a bullet rips away the right side of VanderJagt's head. For long seconds he remains standing. Then he falls.

Minutes later, Jaehnig takes VanderJagt's service revolver and kills himself.

Auman is taken to the police station for questioning. Police assumed that Auman had been an accomplice of Jaehnig's and that she and Jaehnig were allies and perhaps friends. The truth was more complicated.

Auman and Jaehnig had only met earlier that day. Jaehnig was the friend of a friend whom Auman had asked for help in retrieving some of her belongings from the apartment of a former boyfriend who had been abusive and had been keeping many of Auman's belongings in his apartment at the Hudson Hotel in Buffalo Creek in the mountains above Denver.

Auman's friend invited along Jaehnig, a skinhead with a long history of violence in Denver. But Lisl Auman didn't know anything about Jaehnig's past. By the time the group reached Buffalo Creek, it was apparent that Jaehnig was someone to be feared, and when Jaehnig started burglarizing Shawn Cheever's apartment, Auman couldn't do much about it.

Many hours later, as Jaehnig was leading the police on a high speed chase through the city streets of Denver, Auman had become a hostage to the heavily armed and obviously violent Jaehnig who forced Auman to hold the steering wheel while he leaned out the window and fired wildly at the police in pursuit.

The chase eventually ended at the apartment complex in Denver where Auman fled from Jaehnig and where Jaehnig murdered Bruce VanderJagt.

Was Auman a hostage or was she an accessory to murder? And if she was an accessory, could she be charged with first degree murder for a crime that took place while she was locked in the back of a police car?

Under the felony murder law, the answer to the latter question is yes.

Felony Murder

Moseley describes the concept of felony murder:

Felony murder is a favored statute of prosecutors because it allows them to cast the widest possible net around a crime to include people who may have had no intent for the crime to happen. Colorado law states ‘ the purpose of the felony murder statute is to hold a participating robber accountable for a non-participant's death, even though unintended, as long as death is caused by an act committed in the course of or in furtherance of the robbery or in the course of immediate flight therefrom. [Emphasis Moseley's] Prosecutors have used it to ensnare forty-five people under the age of eighteen in Colorado, and over 2,000 juveniles in the U.S., who are all serving sentences of life without parole.

The problem in the Auman case is that it was not clear at all that Vanderjagt's murder in Denver had anything at all to do with the theft that occurred in the mountains many, many hours before. Nor was it clear that Lisl Auman was in the course of immediate flight from the burglary. Indeed, it was most likely that Auman ran to police protection in flight from Jaehnig himself, who had obviously been endangering the life of Auman for hours before the final shoot-out.

However, as one of the attorneys who sympathized with Auman noted, the way the law was being interpreted by the courts meant that "she could have jumped out of the car [as Jaehnig sped down the highway] and she still would be guilty."

A prosecuting attorney later pointed out that the fact that Auman had been in police custody did not matter: "It does not matter where she was. She could have been at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. She could have been on Mir Space Station." She was still guilty because, as the prosecutors claimed, both Auman and Jaehnig were in the course of immediate flight from the burglary of Shawn Cheever at the Hudson Hotel in Buffalo Creek, Colorado.

Another benefit of the felony murder law is that prosecutors don't even need to show that the defendant intended to kill anyone. According to Jeffrey Hartje, a criminal law professor at the University of Denver, "Conspiracy and felony murder are the favored children in the prosecutor's nursery...With felony murder and conspiracy, you don't have to show intention, making a conviction much easier."

Freed of having to show that Auman intended to kill anyone, the prosecutors simply sought to show that she was somehow in league with Jaehnig. In order to convince a jury of the justice of locking Auman away forever, in spite of the fact that she seemingly was no accomplice at all, prosecutors contended that Auman had handed Jaehnig the gun he had fired at police. The police had absolutely no physical evidence of this, but a police officer later changed his original statement to claim that he had indeed seen Auman hand Jaehnig a gun.

The police and prosecution painted a picture of Auman as a surly skinhead and as a misfit and as a angry young women who raged against authority. The local media dutifully repeated and reprinted the prosecution's theories. The police, the public and the media had apparently decided that someone had to pay for VanderJagt's death, and since Jaehnig was dead, Auman was going to have to do.

After an endless number of press conferences organized by prosecutors, numerous condemnations of Auman in the press, and a short trial, the jury voted to convict in spite of the fact that no fingerprints or evidence of gunpowder residue could be produced to connect Auman to any weapons, and the fact that no intent was ever proven.

Auman was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

** UPDATE**  Lisl Auman has been released from prison!!!! 

Ryan McMaken [send him mail] teaches political science in Colorado.

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