About 100 People Still Serve Life Sentences Under Michigan’s Abolished Felony Murder Rule

The Man the Law Left Behind

He has been in prison since before most people reading this piece were born.

He was convicted of first-degree felony murder sometime before November 24, 1980. The prosecution was not required to prove he intended to kill anyone. They were not required to prove he acted with malice. They were required only to prove that someone died during the commission of a felony and that he was present.

Six months later, the Michigan Supreme Court unanimously ruled that this standard was indefensible. The felony murder rule, the court held in People v. Aaron, had never legitimately existed in Michigan. To convict someone of murder, the prosecution must prove malice. The intent to commit a felony is not malice. It never was.

The ruling applied to all trials in progress and to those occurring after the date of the opinion: November 24, 1980.

Not to trials that had already concluded.

He was already convicted. He is still in prison.

According to amicus briefs filed with the Michigan Supreme Court in 2024 and 2025, approximately 100 people remain incarcerated in Michigan under pre-Aaron felony murder convictions. The Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan described them plainly in their December 2024 brief: by and large, these are elderly Black men who remain incarcerated nearly five decades later.

The court abolished the law they were convicted under. Michigan has never freed them.

What People v. Aaron Actually Did, and Did Not Do

The felony murder doctrine holds that if someone dies during the commission of a felony, every participant in that felony is guilty of murder. No intent to kill required. No proof of malice required. The death itself, combined with the underlying felony, is sufficient.

Michigan had been applying a version of this doctrine since the late nineteenth century, not through a statute but through judicial common law. Courts allowed prosecutors to argue that a defendant’s intent to commit the underlying felony satisfied the malice requirement for murder. It was legally contested from the start: Michigan’s own Court of Appeals had issued conflicting rulings on whether the doctrine existed at all.

In 1980, the Michigan Supreme Court resolved the conflict by abolishing the doctrine entirely.

Justice Fitzgerald’s majority opinion was measured but unambiguous. The felony murder rule, he wrote, had never been a static, well-defined rule at common law. England had abolished it by statute in 1957. Multiple American jurisdictions had moved to restrict or eliminate it. The rule’s persistence in Michigan could not be defended on principled grounds. Malice, real malice found by a jury, is an essential element of murder. Intent to commit a felony is not a substitute.

Justice Ryan was more direct in his concurrence, stating that the offense popularly known as felony murder, which has nothing to do with malice and is not a species of common law murder, would no longer exist in Michigan, if indeed it ever did.

The ruling was unanimous. It was principled. It was correct.

And then the court did something that has defined the problem ever since. It applied the ruling prospectively only.

Who Is Still in Prison, and Why It Matters

Approximately 100 people. That is the number the Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan identified in their December 2024 brief to the Michigan Supreme Court. Roughly 100 individuals remain incarcerated in Michigan under pre-Aaron felony murder convictions: people whose juries were never instructed that malice was a required element of murder, people convicted under a legal standard the court has since called indefensible.

The brief described who these people are: by and large, elderly Black men, incarcerated nearly five decades later.

Consider what that means structurally. A 20-year-old convicted in 1979 is now approaching 70. He has spent his entire adult life in prison under a conviction that could not be obtained today. Not because the evidence was insufficient by current standards, which cannot be known without a proper hearing, but because the jury that convicted him was never asked to find what Michigan law now requires: that he acted with intent to kill, intent to inflict great bodily harm, or wanton disregard for human life. The prosecution was not required to prove it. The jury was not required to find it. The verdict does not reflect it.

And yet the incarceration continues.

The Structural Failure: Why Retroactivity Gets Blocked

There are two paths to Aaron retroactivity. The Michigan Supreme Court could rule that Aaron applies retroactively. Or the Michigan Legislature could pass a statute granting relief. Neither has happened. The question is why, and the answer is structural.

The Judicial Path

The 1980 court’s prospectivity rule was thin from the start. As the 2025 amicus briefs document, the court dedicated exactly one sentence to the question and conducted no formal retroactivity analysis. Subsequent cases, including People v. Hall, addressed the issue only briefly, leaving the question formally unresolved.

The Michigan Supreme Court is now actively considering the question in current litigation. The argument for retroactivity is straightforward: Aaron‘s 1980 prospectivity rule was itself decided without proper analysis. Stare decisis does not require deference to a holding that was never examined. And there is a constitutional dimension: if a jury was never instructed on malice, the verdict may not satisfy the Sixth Amendment’s requirement that juries make the factual findings supporting a sentence.

The argument against retroactivity is institutional: finality. Courts are reluctant to reopen convictions that are decades old. Witnesses are dead or unavailable. Evidence is gone. A retroactivity ruling, opponents argue, would flood the courts with resentencing requests.

The Legislative Path

The Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration lists Aaron Retroactivity as a named 2025-2026 legislative priority. Senate Bill 89, introduced in the current session, contains language making pre-Aaron felony murder convictions eligible for parole. The bill has not advanced.

The reason is political. Republicans retook majority control of the Michigan House after the 2024 elections. Criminal justice reform legislation that moved under the Democratic majority, including Second Look sentencing, cash bail reform, and juvenile justice changes, has stalled or been blocked in the new session. Aaron retroactivity, which would require the legislature to acknowledge that approximately 100 people have been incarcerated under an abolished legal standard for nearly 50 years, has not found a path forward in the current political environment.

The Constitutional Dimension

The argument for Aaron retroactivity is not purely statutory. There is a constitutional layer that the current litigation has brought into focus.

The Sixth Amendment requires that juries, not judges, find the facts that support a criminal sentence. If a conviction rests on a factual finding that the jury was never asked to make, in this case the presence of malice, there is a serious question about whether the conviction satisfies constitutional requirements. The 2025 brief made this point explicitly: to allow trial judges today to make a retroactive finding of malice, substituting judicial determination for the jury finding that was never made, would itself be unconstitutional. The solution is not to paper over the problem with a judicial malice determination. The solution is resentencing.

There is also a Michigan constitutional dimension. Article 1, Section 16 of the Michigan Constitution prohibits cruel or unusual punishment. The 2025 brief argued that a death-in-prison sentence for a conviction obtained without any finding of malice, where the jury was affirmatively told malice was not required, may constitute exactly the kind of punishment the Michigan Constitution was designed to prevent.

This is not a novel argument. Michigan courts have applied proportionality review to sentences that reflected the constitutional defects of their time. The juvenile lifer decisions are the closest analogy: there, too, the court found that incarceration under a standard later declared unconstitutional required resentencing, regardless of when the original conviction occurred. Aaron retroactivity is the same principle applied to a different error.

Why This Has Stayed Invisible

Aaron retroactivity does not have a documentary. It does not have a viral advocacy campaign. The approximately 100 people it affects are elderly, incarcerated, largely Black, and have been in prison so long that most people have forgotten they exist.

That invisibility is not accidental. It is the product of several structural forces operating simultaneously.

The first is framing. Felony murder cases frequently involve violent underlying crimes: robbery, arson, sexual assault. The policy debate about retroactivity gets collapsed, in the public narrative, into a debate about releasing violent offenders. That framing obscures the actual legal question. The issue is not whether the underlying felony was violent. The issue is whether malice was ever established. Those are different questions. A person can have participated in a robbery without having intended for anyone to die. The felony murder rule convicted them as if they did. Aaron said that was wrong. Retroactivity is about whether that wrong gets corrected.

The second is finality. Courts and legislatures are institutionally resistant to revisiting old convictions. Finality is a genuine legal value: a real interest in the stability of the legal system. The problem is that finality is being applied asymmetrically. The state has no trouble maintaining convictions obtained under abolished legal standards. It is considerably less willing to revisit those convictions to correct the effect of the abolition. Finality runs in one direction.

The third is the race and age factor. The 100 people still incarcerated under pre-Aaron convictions are, by the court’s own record, predominantly elderly Black men. The history of who gets remembered in criminal justice reform campaigns and who does not is not random. Cases that generate public advocacy tend to involve younger defendants, visible cases, or defendants with access to legal resources and advocates. People who have been incarcerated for 45 years, with no active case and no recent coverage, tend not to generate campaigns.

The Verdict

The Michigan Supreme Court abolished felony murder in 1980. The legal standard under which approximately 100 people remain incarcerated does not exist. It has not existed for 45 years.

The court that abolished it applied it prospectively, with one sentence and no analysis. That was a failure: not of the abrogation itself, which was correct, but of the court’s responsibility to grapple with what the abrogation meant for the people already convicted under the old rule.

The legislature has had 45 years to act. Senate Bill 89 sits in committee. The Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration has named this a priority. The Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan have filed detailed briefs explaining who is affected and what relief would look like. The record is complete.

The legislature knows who is still in prison. They have chosen not to act. That is not a neutral position. Inaction is a choice. Allowing approximately 100 elderly people to die in prison under a legal standard the court itself declared indefensible, because correcting the error is politically inconvenient, because finality is a convenient principle when it keeps people incarcerated, because the people most harmed have the least political power, is a choice that the Michigan Legislature is making, actively, every session it fails to pass Aaron retroactivity legislation.

The Michigan Supreme Court has an opportunity to resolve this judicially. The current litigation is the clearest opening in decades. If the court concludes that the one-sentence prospectivity rule of 1980 was insufficient, and the record supports that conclusion, it can provide the remedy the legislature has refused to provide.

Retroactivity is not mercy. It is not a gift. It is the correction of a legal error that should have been corrected in 1980. It is what the system owes to the approximately 100 people it convicted under a standard it subsequently declared to be wrong. They have been waiting 45 years. The court fixed the law. Michigan never fixed the people it broke with the old one.