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Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away | The New Yorker

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A draconian legal doctrine called felony murder has put thousands of Americans—disproportionately young and Black—in prison.

Save this story Save this story In 1982, when Ian Marcus was nine days old, his father left work and headed home to his family on Long Island on a new moped, only to be killed by a driver who’d run a red light. “Here I was, this twenty-five-year-old widow with a baby,” Ian’s mother, Donna, told me. About a year and a half after the accident, when a bearded guy who ran a Brooklyn meat locker asked her out, “it took ten friends to convince me to go.” Her date, Dean Amelkin, arrived with a plastic train set for Ian. Before long, her son had a second dad, a second last name, and two younger sister

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