Plan to Kill, Face Life or Death
Video Transcribed: So, could I possibly be convicted of murder? Hi, I’m Ty Smith, an OKC lawyer with Wirth Law, and this is important. This is arguably the biggest offense an individual could commit is first-degree murder. And as the name might suggest, if there’s a first degree, it logically has to be some degrees following it. In Oklahoma, it’s broken up into two degrees, first and second degrees. That’s what we’re going to cover today.
First-degree murder requires a law school term known as the malice of forethought or some type of premeditation for your killing someone. Okay? There has to be the death of someone else for it to be murder. And premeditation of course means some type of planning, like you, planning to do an act that would kill someone. Now, the malice of forethought’s a bit more amorphous because that essentially means you have the ill intent to kill someone else, and that can occur instantaneously really. It can occur in a moment and you can decide, I’m going to kill this person and then go through with that.
Typically for murder one, the punishment is going to be life in prison. Death in Oklahoma, it’s not a super common way to be punished by it, but it does happen. And lastly, typically in Oklahoma, life is considered 45 years, at least by the Parole and Correction Board, so you have to have served 85% of your sentence, which is 45 years if you get life with the possibility of parole before you are eligible for parole.
Now you can also get murder if you kill someone in the commission of what is an inherently dangerous felony, such as robbery, burglary, or rape, and this is known as felony murder, you killed someone in the course of committing an inherently dangerous felony, that’s going to merit the exact same punishment as if you had just committed first-degree murder. So won’t rehash that.
Next up logically is second-degree murder. Second-degree murder is when you kill someone by doing an activity that is imminently dangerous. That’s the statutory language. And you don’t have to have intended or planned to kill someone, you just had to have done an activity that was imminently dangerous. Maybe a good example is shooting into a building, you didn’t know there were people in there, but shooting into a possibly occupied building is imminently dangerous. And so that’ll lay into a murder two, or yeah. And that one is slightly less. The minimum is 10 years in prison, the max is life. Once more, same as before that it’s typically treated as 45 years license without the possibility of parole. And you have to serve 85% of that before you’re eligible for parole if you are eligible for that.
If you would like to talk more about murder, I can talk to you about that. I can talk to you about any criminal law matter. Once more, I’m Ty Smith, Oklahoma City criminal defense attorney with Wirth Law, and you can find me at theoklahomacityattorney.com or you can call my office at (405) 888-5400 and I’d be glad to speak to you about these things.
