When researchers with the Felony Murder Reporting Project — a two-year investigative effort drawing on The Sentencing Project, Boston University, Howard University School of Law, and Yale's Investigative Reporting Lab — asked Rhode Island how many people are serving sentences for felony murder, the state produced no answer.
The project's records show that Rhode Island took 21 days to respond to its public-records request, then delivered an Excel workbook listing people currently incarcerated but not identifying who among them was convicted and sentenced under felony murder provisions. The state charged $45 for the file. When researchers appealed and asked specifically for felony murder data, they received nothing more.
That blackout places Rhode Island among what the project calls the plurality of states where the true impact of the felony murder rule cannot be measured at all.
The question gained new urgency on July 14, when The Sentencing Project, the Washington-based criminal justice research nonprofit, released "Felony Murder: An On-Ramp for Extreme Sentencing." The report, co-authored with the prosecutor-reform group Fair and Just Prosecution, calls on all U.S. jurisdictions to repeal felony murder statutes, which it argues "violate the principle of proportional sentencing."
Felony murder laws let prosecutors charge someone with murder when a death occurs during their participation in a qualifying felony — a robbery, a burglary, a drug distribution — even if the person did not kill anyone, intend a death, or take part in the killing. Forty-eight states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government retain the doctrine. Only Hawaii and Kentucky have none.
Rhode Island keeps its version buried inside its murder statute. Under Rhode Island General Laws § 11-23-1, a killing committed during the perpetration or attempted perpetration of arson, rape, sexual assault, child molestation, burglary, breaking and entering, robbery, kidnapping, or felony drug distribution is murder in the first degree — the same charge as a willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing. There is no separate crime called felony murder, and that is precisely why the state cannot isolate the data. A first-degree conviction carries life or life without parole.
The national numbers the report assembles are stark. In Pennsylvania in 2020, 80 percent of people imprisoned with a felony murder conviction were people of color, 70 percent of them African American. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, people of color accounted for 80 percent of second-degree felony murder convictions between 2012 and 2018. A California survey found that 72 percent of women, but 55 percent of men, serving life for felony murder were not the ones who committed the killing. In Pennsylvania, nearly three-quarters of those serving life without parole for the offense were 25 or younger when it occurred.
Whether Rhode Island's application mirrors those patterns is unknowable from the state's own records. Broader disparities in the state's system are documented — a December 2023 data snapshot from the Justice Reinvestment Initiative catalogs racial gaps across policing, charging, and incarceration — but the felony murder subset remains a gap in the ledger.
Several states have moved. California narrowed its doctrine in 2018 to reach only major participants who acted with reckless disregard for life. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Michigan have all revised their laws, though reforms in Colorado, Illinois, and Massachusetts were not applied retroactively to those already sentenced. In 2026, Pennsylvania's Supreme Court invalidated mandatory life-without-parole sentences for the offense.
Rhode Island has taken none of these steps. Its 2026 legislative session, which passed an expansion of criminal-record expungement for certain nonviolent felonies, left sentencing law untouched. Bail reform bills died in 2024 after Attorney General Peter Neronha opposed them. No Rhode Island legislator has introduced a felony murder reform bill, and neither the attorney general nor Governor Dan McKee has taken a public position on the doctrine.
Rhode Island does hold one distinction. The General Assembly removed the death penalty from the state penal code on May 9, 1984, so unlike roughly half the felony murder states, Rhode Island cannot execute anyone convicted under the rule. Life without parole remains available.
The Sentencing Project's interim recommendations — short of repeal — include eliminating death and life-without-parole sentences, shielding minors and young adults, ending accomplice liability, and requiring meaningful proof of intent to kill. For now, in Rhode Island, the first obstacle to any such debate is more basic: the state cannot count who its felony murder laws have already reached.