Big scary murderers

Client is a 17-year-old boy walking in a park with his 17-year-old friend and his mother. All three of them come upon client's 15-year-old sister, and it appears that she was having sex with some guy in the park bathroom. The mother is furious and tells the client to go after the guy.

Client and his buddy go into the bathroom to confront the guy. Client demands that the guy empty his pockets because, client says, he wanted to see if there were any condoms in the guy's pockets. All the guy had in his pockets was a couple of dollars, which he dropped to the floor.
After emptying his pockets the guy takes off running. Client chases after him. Client's friend stays behind and pockets the money that had been left on the bathroom floor.

As client is chasing after the guy, the guy trips and falls into a body of water at the park. It turns out that this guy doesn't know how to swim, so he starts struggling in the water. Client actually jumps in to try to get the guy out of the water, but the guy ends up drowning.

Both client and his friend are charged with felony-murder. Felony-murder is a death that occurs as part of committing a felony. (For example, when somebody robs a liquor store and ends up killing the store clerk, the shooting death is a felony-murder. Murder generally requires "malice aforethought," but in the case of felony-murder, the intent to commit just the felony makes you culpable for the death that results from it.)

The underlying felony? Client told the guy to empty his pockets, and the friend took the two dollars that had been in the guy's pocket. For this, both boys are charged with felony strong-arm robbery of the guy in the bathroom. When the guy falls into the water and drowns, the death is the "result" of the felony, because it occurred as the guy was running away from the "robbers."

The friend has already been tried (as an adult) and convicted of murder. Our client is awaiting trial. Client's mother and sister do not visit him in jail.

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Update on August 2, 2005:

I usually don't respond online to comments, because I think it's better to let people say what they want without interfering. But in the interest of accuracy, I'm pasting in part of an anonymous comment made about this post that corrects my flawed example of felony-murder:

"Your felony murder example was a bit off, what you described would most likely be murder in the first degree with special circumstances (shooting the clerk during an armed robbery). Had the clerk been pushed away from the register, tripped, fallen and broken his neck resulting in death, THAT would be a felony murder."

Thank you, anonymous commenter!

While I'm at it, I'll add, in response to the same commenter, that I believe the reason that the client's family does not visit him is because his family sucks. To be fair, a lot of members of inmates' families don't have the flexibility to leave their jobs in the middle of the day, during the idiosyncratic hours the guards allow visits, to see their loved ones. In this case, though, the family seems to see the client as dispensable. Given that he was acting at their behest when he got into trouble in the first place, their betrayal seems extra sucky.

I don't want anybody to think that I see this client as an angel--he was, after all, going to kick the crap out of some guy in a park for having consensual sex with his sister. But he's not a murderer, and neither is the friend who took the money. At the risk of stating what I think is the obvious, these two people are being punished far out of proportion to their actions.

Update

I just got a comment encouraging me to not stop posting. You love me, you really, really do!

Here's what happened. First, the summer law clerks started. These are the law students who come in and work for 10 weeks during the summer. The law students get good hands-on experience; the office gets some decent slave labor. And guess who ends up training and helping the summer law clerks? Just know that the time I would have spent posting here was instead spent expanding the minds and horizons of eager law students, teaching such valuable lessons as the location of the restroom, how to use the photocopier, and the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

Second, they are transitioning me to working on a death penalty case. In practice this means I focus half my time on a single client, leaving me less access to the cheerful tales of all the other clients that come into the office. Soon I will be working exclusively on the one death penalty case and will have to rely solely on the second-hand accounts of the outraged, tired attorneys who actually have contact with the rest of our happy customers.