For Minnesotans, and advocates of gender and racial justice across the U.S., felony murder reform is one fight in the ongoing battle against injustice in the criminal legal system.
In 2017, Briana Martinson, then 20, and Megan Cater, 19, went to the apartment of a man whom they believed had stolen medication from Martinson, with the intent to steal it back. The plan to retrieve the medication soon became a “telephone game,” in Martinson’s words, in which friends that they had asked to come along then invited others.
By the time they arrived at the apartment, Martinson and Cater were joined by several other individuals, two of whom were older men that the women did not know. According to Martinson, one of the men threatened them with a gun before entering, at which point she realized, “Okay, there’s no turning back.”
Martinson attributes her lack of foresight that the situation could become violent, in part, to her age. “Being so young,” Martinson told me, “I was not thinking of the repercussions of what could go wrong.”
The young women say they were forced to lie on the floor at gunpoint, while in another room, one of the men shot and killed the victim that they had intended to rob. While neither Martinson nor Cater planned the murder or participated in the shooting, they were each sentenced to 13 and a half years in prison for aiding and abetting second-degree unintentional felony murder.
Was this a case of wrongful conviction? By the logic of the criminal justice system, the law worked exactly as it was intended to do. Minnesota, like most jurisdictions in the United States (and unlike almost every other country in the world), followed the legal doctrine of felony murder, in which an individual participating in a felony-level crime can be held criminally responsible for a homicide that occurs during the commission of that crime, even if they did not plan the murder or commit it themselves. The state of Minnesota reformed its felony murder law in 2023, based in large part on the relentless advocacy by Linda Martinson and Toni Cater, the mothers of Briana Martinson and Megan Cater. Their daughters’ experience offers fascinating and complicated insights into felony murder in the United States.
In some ways, Briana Martinson’s and Megan Cater’s convictions are textbook examples of felony murder; but in others, their stories diverge sharply. Most people convicted of felony murder are Black and brown men, while Martinson and Cater are white women. That their stories provided the impetus to change the legal framework for felony murder in Minnesota speaks to the efforts put in by their families, the influence of felony murder reform across the nation, and the ways that advocates must continue to fight for justice for all individuals impacted by the criminal legal system.
Felony murder charges are disproportionately lodged against the young, and differentially impact survivors of gender-based violence.
Bradford Colbert, Martinson’s attorney, told me felony murder is unique in that prosecutors are not required to prove intent, which gives the state an enormous amount of leverage. Without the pressure to prove “mens rea,” or a guilty mind, prosecutors can cast a wider net, charging more defendants while requiring less evidence. Both the person directly responsible for the murder and those charged as accomplices—even if they were not present at the time of the murder—are pressured to testify against one another. An analysis of 10 years of murder prosecutions in the state of Minnesota published in 2024 found that over two-thirds of murder cases during this time period were charged as felony murder and the similar category of accomplice liability murder.
Briana Martinson described felony murder laws to me as “an easy out”—a way to “get the most people locked up” by frightening them with lengthy sentences in a justice system that rewards prosecutors for the quantity of convictions.
While Martinson and Cater’s case was instrumental in revising Minnesota’s felony murder law, those most likely to be convicted of this crime are disproportionately Black and brown men, mirroring broader injustices in the criminal legal system. In Minnesota, nearly 60 percent of felony or accomplice liability murder defendants in a recent study were Black, in a state where Black people make up just 7.6 percent of the population. These statistics for felony murder are of an even higher level of racial disproportionality than that of other types of homicide.
Implicit racial bias plays a role; because there is room for subjectivity in defining felony murder in the court system, research and history demonstrate that Black people are more likely to be perceived as dangerous criminals.
Martinson and Cater do fit trends in felony murder as a result of their age and the ways in which gender impacts crime. Felony murder charges are disproportionately lodged against the young, and differentially impact survivors of gender-based violence. Martinson and Cater were 20 and 19 years old at the time they were charged, and both identify as survivors of sexual assault.
Young people in their teens to mid-20s remain in a stage of brain development that does not adequately assess risk, and are prone to the influences of peer pressure. Indeed, the majority of people charged with aiding and abetting a felony murder in Minnesota from 2010 to 2019 were in their mid-20s or younger. When convicted, young people in Minnesota are likely to face long sentences; in Hennepin County (which includes Minneapolis), most 16- and 17-year-olds convicted of aiding and abetting felony murder were sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. Youth are also likely to be charged in a group, which is one of the ways that prosecutors widen the net of those charged with felony murder.
As Nikki Engel from the organization Violence Free Minnesota said, early victimization can be a catalyst for coping behaviors (like drug and alcohol use) that entangle individuals in the criminal justice system. Cater and Martinson, for example, were self-medicating with the drugs that initially led to the planned robbery. It can be very difficult, Engel argued, to separate crime from the experience of trauma, as survivors are always making decisions within that context. Research conducted by the ACLU finds that nearly 60 percent of people in women’s prisons nationwide—and more than 90 percent in some women’s prisons—have a history of physical or sexual abuse prior to incarceration. Violence Free Minnesota, a coalition to end relationship abuse, supported Minnesota’s felony murder law reform because of the frequency with which victims of domestic and sexual violence are criminalized under such statutes.
Martinson and Cater’s families were deeply shaken in the wake of their conviction and sentencing to a Minnesota women’s prison. Briana Martinson’s mother, Linda Martinson, said her initial reaction to her daughter’s incarceration was a feeling of deep shock: “It was hard to get out bed every day.”
A year later, she and Toni Cater, Megan Cater’s mother, finally felt ready to act, on the urging of an attorney, to learn more about advocacy for felony murder reform in places like California, and begin petitioning Minnesota lawmakers to reform the state’s laws. The two mothers were not political before their worlds were changed by their daughters’ convictions, and had to learn as they went; they met with law professors, sent emails, showed up at the Minnesota state Capitol and knocked on doors. Everywhere they went, Linda Martinson told me, they showed lawmakers their daughters’ high school graduation pictures and photos of other impacted people in an attempt to humanize those who were incarcerated for crimes they did not commit. Storytelling was at the center of their efforts—particularly given the politically sensitive nature of their goal: trying to convince lawmakers to support legislation that could be spun as less “tough on crime.”
Eventually their grassroots efforts built momentum as the women were introduced by one legislator to another, even gaining some bipartisan support from Republican politicians who did not historically endorse criminal justice reform.
In June 2021, a Task Force on Aiding and Abetting Felony Murder was established by the Minnesota Legislature, made up of law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys and victim advocates. After conducting an extensive study, in 2022 the task force unanimously recommended revising the felony murder statue so that individuals could not be charged with aiding and abetting felony murder if they did not cause or intend to cause a death and were not major participants in the death, and also allowed a “second look” at sentencing for those already convicted.
The Democratic-controlled legislature passed a law following these recommendations in 2023 and made the legislation retroactive, allowing those serving prison sentences under the old law to petition for resentencing. Martinson and Cater were the first two individuals to successfully apply; their murder sentences were vacated and they were resentenced for burglary, which resulted in their immediate release from prison in February 2024 based on time served. In Briana Martinson’s words, she “felt like an alien” who had “been placed right back out into another planet.”
Today, Briana Martinson is trying to use her story to “take beauty from the ashes,” and “to fight for those that maybe don’t have as many opportunities as I have.” She said she dreamed about the opportunity to use her story to help others while she was still in prison, and is working toward that dream now, including participating with Megan and both of their mothers in a recent convention in Tennessee aimed at creating national felony murder law reform.
More work continues in Minnesota, as state organizations like Violence Free Minnesota and others across the country are advancing recognition of how abuse and coercion impact women’s participation in criminal activity. In 2019 New York passed the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, which recognized that survivors of gender-based violence may be criminalized for coerced criminal acts, or crimes they committed to protect themselves and their loved ones. University of Minnesota law professor Perry Moriearty told me that felony murder conviction are often closely tied to intimate partner violence, and are likely to “criminalize a lot of people who played a pretty passive role.”
New York’s act allows survivors to present evidence of their abuse to petition for a lower sentence or for resentencing if already convicted. Violence Free Minnesota, inspired by this act, has crafted a similar bill for Minnesota and brought it to the legislature each year since 2022. The bill encourages judges to depart from existing sentencing guidelines when a defendant is a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault or sex trafficking, and grants a judicial “second look” to those sentenced without such consideration.
While the reform to Minnesota’s felony murder law meets the goals of many prison reformers and abolitionists to “decarcerate,” meaning to reduce the number of people in prison in the U.S., there are limitations to such reform. These limitations bring us back to the ways that Martinson and Cater’s cases, while significant, do differ from the majority of those imprisoned for felony murder.
As Briana Martinson’s attorney Brad Colbert noted, “Neither Briana nor Megan should have been charged or convicted of murder because they did not intend to kill anyone, nor did they want anyone to die. But it is interesting to note that the first two people to get to take advantage of the change in the law in Minnesota are two white women, which is kind of complicated.”
It is complicated—in part, because the reform established in Minnesota does not abolish felony murder as a criminal statute, which means that Minnesota will surely continue to see a disproportionate number of Black and brown people incarcerated for these offenses, particularly if they go to trial rather than accepting a plea deal, or are unable to afford quality representation. Prison abolitionists warn that nearly all criminal justice reforms create a false sense that the problems within the system have been solved. Moriearty added that reforming felony murder could “simply further entrench [these problems] without meaningfully addressing their racialized application and disproportionately severe punishment.”
For Minnesotans, and advocates of gender and racial justice across the nation, felony murder reform is one fight in the ongoing battle against injustice in the criminal legal system.
