Pa. Supreme Court rejects appeal seeking parole eligibility for 2nd-degree murder on jurisdictional grounds

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said this week that a challenge to the constitutionality of sentencing people to a mandatory life-without-parole prison term for second-degree murder must be handled through individual appellate proceedings, not Commonwealth Court.

Six people serving life without parole for what is known as felony murder — the death of someone during the commission of a felony — filed applications for parole in May 2020 with the state Parole Board.

Each request was denied because, under Pennsylvania law, anyone serving a sentence for second-degree murder is ineligible for early release.

The six people then filed a petition against the board in Commonwealth Court, alleging their sentences amount to cruel and unusual punishment, forbidden by both federal and state law.

Two of the people have since had their sentences commuted by the state Parole Board.

The plaintiffs argued that Commonwealth Court was the proper venue for their petition because they were challenging the state statute that forbids parole for life prison terms — not the validity of their individual sentences.

In May 2021, Commonwealth Court issued a 20-page opinion dismissing the lawsuit. The court said challenges needed to be heard in appellate proceedings for each individual defendant.

The petitioners appealed to the state Supreme Court, which heard oral argument in April.

On Wednesday, in a 34-page majority opinion, the high court affirmed the earlier decision, finding that the challenge to the life without parole sentence must be handled through Post-Conviction Relief Act appeals.

Bret Grote, the director for the Abolitionist Law Center who argued on behalf of the petitioners, said the fight will continue.

“While we’re disappointed that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has declined to consider this legal challenge through this procedural vehicle, this case has prepared them for an eventual decision on this urgent constitutional question,” he said.

The petition filed with the Commonwealth Court was not seeking resentencing for all prisoners serving life without parole for second-degree murder. Instead, it sought to allow them to have the ability to become eligible for parole.

In its opinion, the state Supreme Court said that what the petitioners were seeking does not belong before the Commonwealth Court, whose jurisdiction includes matters involving regulatory agencies, state and local governments, and challenges to Pennsylvania statute.

As has been suggested repeatedly during oral argument in this case and a companion case currently before the state Superior Court, Pennsylvania’s legislature could address the issue of life without parole for second-degree murder.

In a footnote of the opinion, the majority continued to say just that.

“Nothing we say today addresses the General Assembly’s ‘ability to expand parole eligibility to lifers with a simple change to the parole code.’”

But in a dissenting opinion, Justice David N. Wecht wrote that his colleagues in the majority made that effort more difficult with their opinion.

“Many vexing policy issues surround Pennsylvania’s treatment of second-degree murderers,” Wecht wrote. “The majority’s blurring of the distinction between a judgment of sentence and the parole code will make any attempt to address those issues much harder for the policymaking branches in the years to come.”

In his opinion, Wecht notes that people serving life sentences in Pennsylvania make up about 10% of the state prison population — the highest rate in the country. Of those, he continued, about 1,100 of them are in for second-degree despite the fact that “many of whom did not intentionally kill anyone.

“(The court’s) decision … is not simply harmless jurisdictional gatekeeping,” Wecht said. “The majority’s decision will also have very real and regrettable consequences for future policy reforms that have been brewing for decades.”