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The Indiana Supreme Court will hear arguments in two cases involving three of the Elkhart Four on February 26, and a professor and a student from IU McKinney will be there to hear how their work as amici is received by the high court.

Professor Joel Schumm and 3L Michelle Langdon filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Indiana Public Defender Council urging the justices to overrule Palmer v. State, a 1999 case, because the plain language of Indiana’s felony murder statute does not allow a conviction where a third-party not involved in the underlying felony commits the murder or when the victim of the murder is a co-perpetrator.  The Court will hear the arguments beginning at 10:30 a.m. in Blake Layman and Levi Sparks v. State, No. 20A04-1310-CR818; and Anthony Sharp v. State, No. 20A05-1301-MR-4. Convictions were affirmed by the Indiana Court of Appeals in 2014, and although the sentences were reduced by five years, the appellants have petitioned the Supreme Court to accept jurisdiction.

Langdon, who will clerk for Indiana Supreme Court Justice Steven David, ’82, after her graduation in May, says working in IU McKinney’s Appellate Clinic solidified her desire to work in this area of the law.

“I found working on it to be rewarding,” Langdon said of researching and writing the amicus brief with Professor Schumm. “Asking the Indiana Supreme Court to overrule its own precedent is a potentially daunting task, but in this case it is warranted and necessary to correct the flawed interpretation of Indiana's felony murder statute (in Palmer).”

In early October 2012, five Elkhart young people decided to burglarize a home, and tried to find a home that was unoccupied at the time. Thinking they had found such a site, they broke in only to awaken the owner who had been asleep. The oldest of the burglars, 21-year-old Danzele Johnson, was killed when the homeowner began shooting. Teenagers at the time, Blake Layman, Levi Sparks and Anthony Sharp were convicted of felony murder in Johnson’s death. A fourth teenager at the time, Jose Quiroz, pleaded guilty yet attempted unsuccessfully to withdraw his plea at sentencing. Quiroz was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Layman and Sparks were sentenced to 55 years in prison; Sharp was sentenced to 50 years.