Secondly, many of these categories group together people convicted of a wide range of offenses. For violent offenses especially, these labels can distort perceptions of individual “violent offenders” and exaggerate the scale of dangerous violent crime. For example, “murder” is an extremely serious offense, but that category groups together the small number of serial killers with people who committed acts that are unlikely, for reasons of circumstance or advanced age, to ever happen again. It also includes offenses that the average person may not consider to be murder at all. In particular, the felony murder rule says that if someone dies during the commission of a felony, everyone involved can be as guilty of murder as the person who pulled the trigger. Acting as lookout during a break-in where someone was accidentally killed is indeed a serious offense, but many may be surprised that this can be considered murder in the U.S.

My sister's family has a nephew serving eighteen years because one of his friends pulled a knife on a dealer who stiffed him on a quarter bag. The dealer shot the friend five times. But since the dealer is a CI, and the nephew is black, he's serving a mandatory minimum for felony murder.

Kid was eighteen and one month at the time and unarmed.