Only Black People Have Been Convicted of Felony Murder in St. Louis City Since 2010

Reporter Thomas Birmingham did a deep dive on the subject in the Appeal

Jul 14, 2023 at 10:23 am

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The Civil Courts building downtown.

Since 2010, every single person convicted of felony murder in St. Louis city has been Black, according to reporter Thomas Birmingham who did a recent deep dive on the peculiarities of felony murder in Missouri for the Appeal and the Yale Investigative Reporting lab.

Felony murder is a charge brought by prosecutors against individuals whose participation in a lesser criminal act leads to someone's death. For example, someone steals a car and then, fleeing the police, causes a collision that kills a pedestrian.

But Birmingham's story, "How Missouri’s ‘Felony Murder’ Law Traps People for Defending Themselves," focuses on Missourians who had killed someone seemingly in self-defense. Antonio Meanus, the man at the center of the Appeal story, had shot and killed someone who pulled a gun on him and his friend. But, as Birmingham finds, the way that Missouri's felony murder law is written means that, for Meanus and thousands of other Missourians, self-defense is no defense at all.

“Missouri is one of only four states where any felony can be used as the underlying felony in felony murder," Birmingham told the RFT. And if you are one of the almost 70,000 convicted felons in the state, it’s a felony to just possess a gun.

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"If you're a felon, and you're in illegal possession of a firearm because you're a felon, that means that if you shoot someone, no matter what the reason is, you can be very easily convicted of felony murder because the underlying felony is having a gun," Birmingham explains. "All they have to prove is whether or not you have the gun."

“The situation raises questions about who Missouri believes deserves the right to fight back if someone is trying to kill them,” Birmingham wrote in his piece.

Reporting the piece, Birmingham also found out that, across all Missouri, Black people were more likely than people of any other race to be charged with felony murder, and the stats in the city of St. Louis were particularly lopsided.

In St Louis city, 46 people had been convicted of felony murder in the past 13 years, and all 46 were Black.

“I was very shocked to see that it was one hundred percent,” he tells the RFT.

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One of those 46 people is Robert Smith, whose story made headlines last year when he was sentenced to three years in prison for shooting a man in his own home who was attacking him. Smith had a two-decade old felony for drunk driving, making it illegal for him to have a gun. The foreman of the jury who found him guilty expressed regret but said that ultimately their hands were tied.

Elsewhere, in Jackson County, which contains Kansas City, 73 percent of people convicted of felony murder were Black. In St. Louis County, the number was 93 percent. In Green County, in southwest Missouri, the number was 34 percent despite the county having less than a 3 percent Black population.

"It's really consistent throughout the rest of the state," Birmingham says.

You can read Birmingham's full investigative piece at the Appeal.