Sarah Stillman
speaker
394 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Sarah Stillman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah.
And maybe to do so, I'll have to tell you all like the basic concept of felony murder because not everyone has heard of it.
But that was really the starting point for me.
That was a piece that started really conceptually for years and years.
I'd wanted to write about that doctrine, which essentially means that people can be convicted in some states of first degree murder with mandatory life in prison without parole for any situation where if they're involved in a felony and someone dies, even if they in some instances weren't present, you can be convicted of murder.
So.
I knew of many interesting cases across the years, and I'd always been looking for the right one.
And then a friend told me about his friend, Ian Amalkin, and that's the person with whom I start the piece.
And basically what had happened in that case was that two young men in Florida, they went out to a casino and then they went out.
They'd lost a bunch of money, so they were taking loose change from unlocked vehicles.
And they took like a drum set and they stole some minor items from people's cars and a neighbor saw them and called the police.
who came and arrested one of the guys whose name is Sadiq Baxter.
They put Sadiq in handcuffs.
Sadiq thought that was that.
He's going to get taken away in the police car.
And it turned out his friend was around the corner in his vehicle and fled from the police and wound up in the midst of a high-speed chase with the police hitting and killing two bicyclists, one of whom was Ian's father.
And so it turned out that Sadiq was prosecuted, even though he was not at the scene and was in handcuffs at the time, for committing two first-degree murders because of the felony murder doctrine.
And Ian and his family were actually quite upset about this because they were about to go to these proceedings in which now, not only had they just lost their father to this horrible, traumatic incident, but then they felt like now another person who was also a father, which is Sadiq, was also going to lose...
his ability to be with his kid and the person who was driving the vehicle also was convicted of I think two counts of first-degree murder.
So as soon as I heard about it, I was like, this is a really profound illustration of how this doctrine works and why it feels bizarre because it was a mandatory life in prison without parole sentence.
Showing 281–300 of 394 · page 15 of 20
← Previous
Next →