Felony murder doctrine recalls infamous "Elkhart Four" overturned by Indiana Supreme Court

ELKHART — Deante Dalton is not the only juvenile prosecuted as an adult for felony murder in Elkhart County. A few years before Dalton's 2014 arrest, a group of five friends had broken into a home to steal some cash and, after the homeowner shot one of them, the other four were prosecuted for the death of their friend.

In a case that drew international news coverage, an Elkhart Circuit Court jury had convicted teenagers Levi Sparks, Blake Layman and Anthony Sharp Jr. of felony murder in connection with the 2012 shooting death of their burglary accomplice, 21-year-old Danzele Johnson, at the hands of homeowner Rodney Scott.

The trio, along with Johnson and Jose Quiroz, were teenagers smoking marijuana on the porch of Quiroz’s Elkhart home on Oct. 3, 2012 when they decided to look for a home to burglarize. They ultimately chose a house across the street, believing its owner, Rodney Scott, wasn’t home. But when they broke in, they realized Scott was upstairs in bed.

Scott pulled out a pistol and started shooting at the teens, killing Johnson, 21.

The foursome were charged under Indiana’s felony murder statute, since a person was killed during the commission of a felony crime.

Dalton’s attempt to appeal his case to the Indiana Court of Appeals was unsuccessful. Three of the four young men from this other case, however, who appealed on similar grounds, had their felony murder convictions overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 2015. (Jose Quiroz pleaded guilty to the felony murder charge and legally could not appeal. He did later have his sentence reduced from 45 years to 10 years after then-prosecutor Curtis Hill said his sentence should be equitable with his codefendants.)

“I think the defendants were different people,” said Ross Thomas, the defense attorney hired by the Daltons to handle Deante Dalton's appeal. Thomas noted both that the defendants had different counsel and that two of the three defendants in the overturned case were white. “I’m glad for those boys, but certainly the applicability should be across the board.”

Felony murder? He's served ⅓ of his life in prison for someone else killing his cousin

According to the 2022 census, Elkhart County is 89.2% white and 6.2% Black. The Elkhart County Circuit Court did not provide data regarding the demographics and number of juveniles convicted of felony murder who were tried as juveniles, but data obtained through a public records request on people tried as adults in Elkhart County indicate that, since 2012, 18 people were charged in the county with felony murder. Only three of those 18 defendants were white, two of whom had their convictions overturned. The other had his felony murder charge dropped in exchange for pleading guilty to robbery resulting in serious bodily injury.

About 72% of those charged with felony murder in Elkhart County were Black, and about 40% of those charged were juveniles tried as adults.

Debating whether felony murder is appropriate or effective

Appellate attorney Thomas says that, in a few cases, he could understand Prosecutor Vicki Becker’s explanation of the felony murder rule as an accountability measure. For example, he said, if someone runs into a bank and starts shooting wildly and a security guard shoots back and hits and kills someone else, then felony murder might be sensible. But often, he added, “It’s not applied fairly, and it ends up with what I think are ridiculous results,” such as Dalton’s case where, even if he is lying about being in the house or firing a gun, the only person who died was his cousin and alleged co-conspirator.

Others, like legal experts Riya Shah and Zachary Stock, don’t see the felony-murder rule as ever being necessary. “I think it’s pretty well-established criminological fact that the severity of punishment is not a good deterrent for certain behavior, and particularly not with juveniles,” said Stock, legislative council with the Indiana Public Defender Council . “These kids that get wrapped up in some spur-of-the-moment robbery or smash-and-grab operation or think it’s gonna be fun to burglarize a house and someone winds up getting killed, they’re not thinking about any consequences, let alone the consequence of potentially being responsible for murder.”

Criminal law is based entirely on intent, according to Shah, senior managing director of the Juvenile Law Center — a Philadelphia-based public interest law firm for children. She argued “you cannot assume intent based on being there,” especially in the case of juveniles who are highly susceptible to peer pressure. But she also noted that felony murder disproportionately affects Black and brown people — there is no Indiana-wide data on felony murder demographics, but the above Elkhart county statistics demonstrate the disproportionate charging of people of color in that area. Further, a recent study by Kat Albrecht, a criminology professor at Georgia State University, found that 81.3% of people sentenced under the felony murder rule in Cook County, Illinois are Black (according to data from the 2020 United States Census, 23.6% of the county is Black) — and is largely responsible for pushing juveniles of color into the adult incarceration system.

“It’s a system that is designed to maintain social control over certain populations,” Shah added. “And I do not believe it is an effective tool.”

Legal experts and Dalton’s family pointed to his ineffective counsel and his race as the reason for his conviction.

“The system is very corrupt, and they get a hoot out of making an example out of little Black boys,” Monica Jones, the now 30-year-old mother of Dalton’s son, said. “It was very confusing for me to look at this young man who had never been in trouble, was a good father, and think that the best option was to put him away.”

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Felony murder doctrine recalls infamous "Elkhart Four" overturned by Indiana Supreme Court