The Shelby County District Attorney’s Office will analyze data to find out whether there are current racial disparities in how prosecutors use a little-known rule recently investigated by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism.
District Attorney Steve Mulroy made the announcement in an exclusive interview after reading “Power and Prejudice,” an investigation that looked at how the “felony murder rule” convicts Black children for murders they didn’t commit.
“We’re trying to avoid any even unintentional discrimination,” Mulroy said in an interview. “And so that’s something that we’re going to be talking about, depending on the results of the data analysis.”
The rule states that if you participate in a felony and someone dies because of the crime, a prosecutor can charge you with their murder.
The MLK50 investigation revealed for the first time that from 1995 to 2019, almost 90% of Tennessee children convicted of felony murder have been Black. Over 40% of those children were convicted in Shelby County. Bill Gibbons, the county’s district attorney from 1996 to 2011, prosecuted most of those youth. Every child convicted of felony murder during his tenure was Black.
No one monitors how prosecutors use the rule. The state does not track how many people — adults or children — have been convicted of felony murder, nor how many have been charged.
MLK50: Justice Through Journalism spent a year collecting data on felony murder. We analyzed court records from hundreds of cases and conducted dozens of interviews with those incarcerated under the rule and their families, former defense attorneys and former prosecutors.
The data analyzed by MLK50 ended in 2019, when Amy Weirich was the Shelby County District Attorney. Mulroy defeated her and was sworn in as the county’s new district attorney in 2022.
Mulroy said he has instructed his data team to analyze whether there are racial disparities in how his office handles felony murder prosecutions against both children and adults.
“It’s certainly something that we can be mindful of and communicate to the prosecutors to make sure they’re trying to check against any unconscious biases that we may have,” Mulroy said.
Mulroy said he believes that during his tenure as district attorney, prosecutors have understood that the felony murder rule is intended as a “backstop … when we are convinced that the defendant did in fact act with intent to kill.” Other important factors that influence a prosecutor’s decision to apply the felony murder rule include what role, if any, the defendant played in the killing and whether they cooperate with law enforcement, he said.
“We want to make sure that we aren’t overusing (the felony murder rule) in cases where the defendant’s involvement was incidental or removed from the actual killing, or we have serious doubts about (intent),” Mulroy said. “I’d like to think that any racial disparity that does exist is smaller than under prior years, but, well, the numbers are what the numbers are.”
Katherine Burgess is the government accountability reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact her at katherine.burgess@mlk50.com
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