To supporters and advocates, we wanted to share the FMEP Summer 2026 Newsletter to inform about our work, our projects, and the progress we’ve made toward our shared goals of eradicating the felony murder rule from American law, advocating for those unjustly sentenced, and promoting meaningful legal reform..

Dear FMEP Community,

It has been a busy year at Felony Murder Elimination Project. From continuing the fight for felony murder reform in California, to studying how past reforms have actually affected people serving these sentences, to building a stronger national movement against felony murder and extreme punishment, our work continues to grow.We wanted to share some of what we have been working on, where things stand, and what we are looking toward next.

California Felony Murder Impact Study

One of our largest projects this year has been the California Felony Murder Impact Study, conducted in partnership with Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law & Justice Center.

More than 1,000 incarcerated people responded to our survey, sharing information about their convictions, sentences, roles in the underlying offense, resentencing proceedings, and experiences seeking relief under California’s felony murder reforms.

We are now analyzing those responses alongside other available court and sentencing data to better understand the implementation of Senate Bills 1437 and 775.

Our central question is not only who benefited from reform, but who was left behind. We are examining differences across counties, barriers to resentencing, the impact of special circumstances and accomplice liability, and the experiences of people who remain incarcerated despite significant changes to California law.

We are deeply grateful to everyone who trusted us with their experiences. Their participation will allow this study to provide a much fuller picture of how felony murder reform has operated in practice, and where further change is needed.

Once completed, we plan to use the study to inform legislative advocacy, public education, future research, and the next phase of felony murder reform in California.

Building Across Movements and Continuing the Fight in CA

The passage of SB 1437 and SB 775 was a major change, but it is not the full extent of felony murder reform that we intend to pursue.

FMEP continues to work with directly impacted people, advocates, attorneys, and partner organizations to examine the parts of California’s felony murder laws that remain unjust and to develop strategies for further reform. Increasingly, that also means situating felony murder within the broader movement to end life without parole and other forms of extreme punishment.

We have continued our work with the Drop LWOP coalition and other partners advocating for meaningful sentence review and opportunities for people serving extreme sentences to return home. At the same time, we have been strengthening FMEP’s relationships with other movements whose work closely intersects with felony murder, particularly the survivor justice and death penalty abolition movements.

Our relationship with the survivor justice movement has grown as we continue to see how often experiences of abuse, coercion, trafficking, and intimate partner violence are connected to the circumstances that lead people into felony murder and other serious prosecutions. For many criminalized survivors, the legal system fails to fully account for the conditions under which an offense occurred or the ways abuse and coercion shaped a person’s choices. We are working to build stronger partnerships with organizations supporting criminalized survivors and to ensure that felony murder is part of broader conversations about survival, accountability, and the way our legal system responds to harm.

We have also been deepening our relationships with the death penalty abolition movement. This fall, FMEP participated in a national gathering of death penalty organizers and advocates, where we helped bring life without parole and other extreme sentences into the conversation. We see an important opportunity for our movements to work more closely together: as advocates fight to end executions, we also want to ensure that LWOP is not treated as the automatic or acceptable alternative to the death penalty.

Across all of these partnerships, our goal is to build a broader movement that challenges the idea that justice requires permanent punishment. Felony murder reform, ending LWOP, supporting criminalized survivors, and abolishing the death penalty are distinct fights, but they raise many of the same fundamental questions about culpability, transformation, accountability, and whether people should ever be denied the possibility of coming home.

Building a National Movement

Felony murder remains a national problem, and we have continued working to connect people fighting it across the country and beyond. In July, FMEP organized the National Convening to End Felony Murder in Chicago, co-sponsored by and hosted at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Conviction and with support from Vital Projects. More than 60 advocates, attorneys, researchers, organizers, and directly impacted leaders came together from around the world, representing 17 states and 3 countries, to share what is happening in their states and develop strategies for moving the movement forward.

The conversations covered everything from legislative campaigns and post-conviction litigation to felony murder and young people, communications and public education, and ways to challenge extreme sentences.

One thing was clear throughout the gathering: no state should have to build this movement alone.

FMEP continues to coordinate a national network where advocates can share legislation, court decisions, research, campaign strategies, and lessons learned. We are tracking reforms around the country and helping connect people in states where new campaigns are beginning. 

There have also been important developments in several states. In Pennsylvania, for example, the state Supreme Court ruled this year that a sentencing system that automatically makes every person convicted of felony murder ineligible for parole, without individualized consideration of culpability, violates the Pennsylvania Constitution. Advocates in other states, including New York, are continuing to push legislation to dramatically narrow or repeal felony murder and create opportunities for people already serving sentences to return to court.

Taken together, developments like these reflect growing momentum for felony murder reform across the country. As more states pursue change through legislation, litigation, and other strategies, coordination across the movement becomes increasingly important. Through our national coalition, FMEP is working to create space for advocates, attorneys, researchers, and directly impacted leaders to workshop strategies, share knowledge and resources, learn from successes and setbacks in other states, and identify approaches that can be adapted across jurisdictions. By connecting efforts that might otherwise remain isolated, we can strengthen individual campaigns while building a more coordinated national movement to end felony murder.

You can read more about the National Convening to End Felony Murder here: Convening Recap

What Comes Next

In the months ahead, we will continue analyzing the Impact Study and preparing the findings for publication, while developing strategies to translate that research into policy change.

We will also continue strengthening the national coalition, supporting state campaigns, building partnerships across movements, and creating more opportunities for directly impacted people to shape the direction of our work.

None of this happens without our community. If you are interested in becoming more involved with FMEP, partnering with us, or supporting this work financially, we would love to hear from you.

Your support helps make possible everything from original research and legislative advocacy to national coalition-building, public education, and ongoing correspondence with people incarcerated under felony murder and extreme sentencing laws.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed their time, expertise, stories, resources, and trust to this work. We are grateful to be building this movement with you.

In solidarity,
Felony Murder Elimination Project