Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Next week, Alabama plans to execute a 75-year-old man who gets around in a wheelchair and wears a padded helmet to protect his head from frequent falls. He also never killed anyone.His name is Charles “Sonny” Burton, and he was one of six people who robbed a Talladega AutoZone in 1991. Burton had already left the store when another one of the robbers, Derrick DeBruce, shot and killed a man named Doug Battle. Even though it was DeBruce who fired the gun, all six of the people involved in the robbery were eligible for the death penalty. Some took plea deals. DeBruce, for his part, went to trial and was initially sentenced to death. Then, Burton went to trial. Even though no one disputed that he was physically outside the AutoZone when the shooting happened, under Alabama’s felony murder law, Burton was sentenced to death, too.

In 2014, the state agreed to resentence DeBruce, the actual shooter, to life without parole. If Burton is executed on March 12, he will be the only person that Alabama executes for Battle’s murder, since the actual triggerman was granted leniency.

How did Alabama get here? If someone dies while you’re committing a felony crime, regardless of whether you had any intent to kill them or directly participated in their death, the law of felony murder says that you can be charged with first-degree murder. This law encompasses everyone involved in that felony, holding them equally responsible under a doctrine called accomplice liability.

Felony murder allows for an incredibly broad net of culpability, yet it is law in most states. In one such case, a Florida man named Ryan Holle was sentenced to life in prison for lending his car keys to a friend who committed a robbery in which a woman was killed. The Supreme Court has put some limitations on sentencing people to death for felony murder, however. To get the death penalty if you did not directly kill the victim, you must have been a “major” participant in the felony and acted with “reckless indifference toward human life.”

“When you combine accomplice liability, felony murder, and the death penalty, it is a toxic stew,” professor Maria Kolar, of Oklahoma City University School of Law, told me. “Each one of them has the potential for great........

© Slate