The Project
The Felony Murder Reporting Project is an independent, interactive online storytelling hub and data project accompanying Sarah Stillman's 2023 investigative reporting on felony murder for the New Yorker.
The project will serve as a living resource to encourage local and national efforts to document the felony murder doctrine’s reach, while supporting local investigative reporting and public-interest data journalism on the issue.
The Process
For the last two years, the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale has been working to investigate the scope and human toll of the felony-murder rule, collaborating with law school clinics, data analysts, and digital storytellers at Zealous.
We started by filing dozens of public-records requests with state Departments of Corrections. But what we got back, from one department after the next, were mostly rejections. “Please be advised,” wrote one representative from the state of Virginia, that their Department of Corrections “does not have any records responsive to your request because the records do not exist.”
So, we ramped up our methods.
Thus far, we have spent more than a thousand collaborative hours to unearth and analyze more than 10,000 cases, state by state, examining race, gender, age, and other variables.
Who We Are
For the last year, the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale has been working to investigate the scope and human toll of the felony-murder rule, collaborating with law school clinics, data analysts, and digital storytellers at Zealous.
We worked closely with a team of academic collaborators — at Howard Law School’s Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center Movement Lawyering Clinic; Caitlin Glass and researchers at Boston University; the University of Connecticut Law School; and Measures for Justice, a non-profit focused on assessing criminal justice policies by the numbers — to unearth and analyze original data, state by state, examining race, gender, age, and other variables within felony-murder convictions.
Baji Tumendemberel did the original round of data outreach and data analysis across Departments of Corrections; students in Sarah Stillman’s investigative reporting class at Yale, English 480, contributed public-records work. Thomas Birmingham contributed significant data research and reporting. Criminology and law professors, as well as data scientists with a speciality in felony murder data, also provided substantial verification assistance.
Project Partners
Zealous
Zealous is an award-winning national initiative that skills up and supports coalitions of public defenders, advocates, and people with direct experience to harness the power of media, technology, storytelling, and the arts to tell more compelling stories and work better together. The mission: a policy and media landscape that follows facts and makes decisions based on reason rather than fear.
Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale
The Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale aims to enhance the power of collaborative public-interest journalism. Rooted in the idea that accountability-centered reporting is critical to a thriving democracy, we seek to deepen coverage of criminal justice, climate change, migration, mental health, and other themes, through experimentation with team-driven methods, pursuit of public records, new forms of multimedia storytelling, and more. The Lab is funded by the Yale Law School, and this project was made possible by support from the SNF Fund for the Integration of Theory and Practice.