Death for the Pirate?

Beldar writes about the apparent mistakes in the reporting about the one surviving pirate involved in the M/V Maersk Alabama, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse.  It seems he's eligible for harsher punishment than the news media seem to believe.

This NYT story — like every other mainstream media report I've seen since the attempted hijacking and hostage-taking — again incorrectly claims that life imprisonment is the most severe penalty available for any of the crimes with which Muse has been charged. As I wrote last week, 18 U.S.C. § 1203(a) provides that "if the death of any person results, [hostage-taking] shall be punished by death or life imprisonment." The statute doesn't require that the defendant himself have committed the homicide, nor that the victim of the homicide be one of the hostages. Rather, as with many state felony murder laws, all that section 1203(a) literally requires is that the hostage-taking have resulted in "the death of any person" for its violation to become a capital crime punishable by death. The criminal exposes himself to this penalty by taking part in a crime which ends up getting anyone killed as a result, even if it's an innocent bystander killed by accident, or even if it's one of his accomplices and co-conspirators who's killed in a justifiable homicide by law enforcement officers.