People v. Allen

Defendant was convicted of a felony murder. Killing a person while perpetrating or attempting to perpetrate a robbery constitutes first-degree murder in this state.1

Defendant’s first assigned error involves analysis of one of criminal law’s most fundamental principles :

“An unsupported confession should not be received as sufficient evidence of the corpus delicti.”2 People v. Lane (1882), 49 Mich 340, 341.

The prosecution was supplied with a number of “confessions” in the present case due to defendant’s tendency to inform his friends and jail inmates that he had shot the victim while attempting…