WHAT MAKES A MURDER?

How a draconian legal doctrine imprisons people for killings they didn't commit.

- SARAH STILLMAN

In 1982, when Ian Marcus was nine days old, his father left work and headed home to his family on Long Island on a new moped, only to be killed by a driver who'd run a red light. Here I was, this twenty-five-year-old widow with a baby,” Ian’s mother, Donna, told me. About a year and a half after the accident, when a bearded guy who ran a Brooklyn meat locker asked her out, it took ten friends to convince me to go.” Her date, Dean Amelkin, arrived with a plastic train set for Ian. Before long, her son had a second dad, a second last name, and two younger sisters.

The family relocated to South Florida, where Dean helped his own father run a graphics shop. Eager for Ian and his sisters to achieve more economic stability than he’d known, Dean pushed them academically, weeping with pride when Ian won a national debating championship in high school. Eventually, Ian went on to law school, landing a job at an élite Manhattan law firm; as a kid, he had watched My Cousin Vinny” with his dad, and they'd agreed that lawyering looked fun.

One Sunday morning in August, 2012, Ian, now thirty, was in bed in Brooklyn when his mother called, distraught. Every Sunday for more than a decade, Dean had met some buddies at a shopping center, biked thirty miles to a beach and back, and then lingered over breakfast. But on that morning Dean hadn't made it home. For the second time in his life, Ian had lost his father to a reckless driver.

This shock was swiftly followed by another. As a result of the crash, which all parties agreed was unintentional, two men stood accused of murdering his father and a friend who was cycling with him. One of those charged, twenty-five-year-old Sadik Baxter, had never laid eyes on the victims. At the moment of impact, he had been miles away, in handcuffs.