So strange that Law & Crime article questioning whether the Capitol rioters could be prosecuted for felony murder and it *never discusses* the most obvious predicate felony—burglary

https://t.co/cSFJzB5fwq via @lawcrimenews

As I will be teaching my first year criminal law students later this semester, felony murder is often a question of charging strategy for prosecutors. The defendant has often multiple felonies, some of which trigger felony murder and some of which don’t.

This article makes the classic mistake of analyzing only one possible underlying felony—sedition—and not the other, more mundane felonies, including burglary.
It’s the sort of error that loses students a lot of points on their final exam!

This basic error--misidentifying the relevant predicate felony--ends up affecting the other analysis in the article. For example, the author correctly points out that there are some other Qs that must be answered for felony murder to apply.

This analysis looks different if we are talking about burglary---which the Supreme Court defines not only as entering a building to commit a crime, but also remaining in the building.
That's going to make the "remoteness" inquiry pretty easy, not complicated as the article says.