It’s not unusual to hear a defense attorney asserting that his sleazebag client is innocent of the crime that a jury convicted him of committing.

What is unusual — and what I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since The Pilot’s John Chappell first reported on it a couple of weeks ago — is having members of the jury claim the same thing.

It happened in the case of Robert Alexander Verbal, 23, who lives in Aberdeen. Or rather, he used to live in Aberdeen. Now he lives in prison. According to his sentence, he will live there for the rest of his natural-born life, without possibility of parole, because he committed first-degree murder.

I always thought first-degree murder meant premeditated murder. Didn’t you? Yet Robert Alexander Verbal has begun undergoing what has been called “a slow death sentence” because of what happened on a day last year when he set out intending to do nothing more serious than buy “a dime bag of weed.”

Or so he says. It may well be that he and a companion set out intending to rob the drug dealer. (No honor among thieves.) Verbal was packing a pistol in his pocket. But the point is that no one is claiming he set out intending to kill anybody.

One thing is sure: Events lurched out of control on that day in a home in Aberdeen. Either the drug dealer spotted the gun in Verbal’s pants or else Verbal pulled the gun, depending on whom you believe. In either case, the dealer grabbed the gun. A confusing struggle ensued. The gun went off more than once, and a bystander at a distance, David C. Blue, was killed.

In a way, events also lurched out of control last month in a courtroom in Carthage. A jury, by all accounts a good one that took its job unusually seriously, heard the evidence and duly found Verbal guilty of first-degree murder — even though some or maybe most of the jurors didn’t think he deserved it.

The judge sentenced Verbal to life in prison and threw away the key, as he was required to do. Verbal well could have ended up with the state treating him to an intravenous cocktail instead, but for the fact that the D.A. could not seek the death penalty for Verbal and his partner in crime because the partner was mentally retarded.

Members of the jury were apparently so troubled by the situation that they wrote the judge a questioning note about it, and now two of them have signed affidavits saying they thought the death was accidental and the sentence was therefore “grossly unfair.” More may follow suit.

At issue here is something called the Felony Murder Rule.

Though some other states that had similar laws have repealed them, North Carolina’s remains on the books. Here’s how the Felony Murder Rule works: If a death occurs while you are committing or attempting to commit a felony such as arson, rape, burglary, robbery or kidnapping, then that death is to be considered first-degree murder. Period.

It matters not that you didn’t intend to kill anybody. It matters not if the death was accidental, as it seems to have been in the Verbal case. The victim could even die of a heart attack. Not only that, but all participants in the underlying felony can also be found guilty of first-degree murder — even those who didn’t hurt anybody, weren’t carrying a gun, and might have just been along for the ride.

I’m sorry. I hate crime as much as the next guy. But there’s something wrong with this picture.

Verbal’s attorney, Richard Roose of Asheboro, has filed a motion seeking to have the conviction vacated on the grounds that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, that it violates the separation of powers by allowing the legislature to dictate sentencing to judges, and that there was no finding of the state of mind required to prove premeditation.

From what I know of this case, Roose isn’t going to arouse much sympathy in me at a personal level for Robert Alexander Verbal. He does not represent the cream of American youth. He was in the wrong place doing wrong things at the wrong time. David C. Blue presumably would be alive today if Verbal and his chum hadn’t shown up at that house with guns in their pockets.

So we can all be happy that Verbal is behind bars. He deserves to spend a good deal of time there for the things he did. But it should gnaw just a bit at the consciences of all of us that he is doing life without parole for something he didn’t do, which was to commit premeditated murder.

It’s hard for me to think of him as a victim, but one thing has been victimized here: the hallowed American principle that the punishment is supposed to fit the crime.