Philadelphia DA sues Pennsylvania Gov asserting execution moratorium is “lawless” and “flagrantly unconstitutional”
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Williams asks the state Supreme Court to rule Wolf’s move a “lawless act,” claiming the governor had no legal right to grant a reprieve to convicted murderer Terrance Williams….
The lawsuit filed by the city’s Democratic district attorney is the second one the Democratic governor has faced since he was sworn in to office Jan. 20. The Republican-controlled Senate sued Wolf in Commonwealth Court over his decision to fire the executive director of the Open Records Office, which the Legislature created when it updated the state’s Right-to-Know Law in 2008.
Wolf’s death penalty moratorium, announced Friday, fulfilled a campaign promise. It was criticized by district attorneys, law enforcement and some lawmakers. Some religious leaders and other lawmakers praised it….
Wolf said he will grant a reprieve each time a death row inmate is scheduled for execution but keep the inmates’ death sentences intact, which was what he did in the case of Terrance Williams. Williams was scheduled to be executed March 4 for the 1984 robbing and fatal tire-iron beating of another man in Philadelphia.
“The governor took the action to place a moratorium on the death penalty because Pennsylvania’s capital punishment system is flawed — it’s ineffective, expensive, and many times unjust,” Wolf spokesman Jeff Sheridan said Wednesday. “As he stated Friday, the governor will wait for the report being produced by the bipartisan Pennsylvania Task Force and Advisory Commission on Capital Punishment, established by the state Senate, and the recommendations within the report are addressed satisfactorily.”
Wolf was within his legal right to grant a reprieve under Article 4, Section 9 of the state constitution, Sheridan added. That section also gives the governor the power to commute sentences and issue pardons.
In his lawsuit, Williams says the governor can grant reprieves only as a temporary measure to allow a defendant to pursue “an available legal remedy.” The governor cannot grant open-ended reprieves in cases where there are no legal questions surrounding guilt, the suit states. “Merely characterizing conduct by the governor as a reprieve does not make it so,” Williams wrote, citing a successful 1994 lawsuit Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli filed against Gov. Robert P. Casey to enforce the death penalty against Martin D. Appel and Josoph Henry….
“The scope of the reprieve power is not mysterious or vague, and it is limited,” Williams’ lawsuit states. “Unlike some states, Pennsylvania does not grant the governor an unlimited at-will power of clemency, without which it is not even possible to posit an arguable ability to impose a moratorium.”
The filing by Philadelphia DA Williams, which is styled an&”Emergency Commonwealth Petition For Extraordinary Relief Under King’s Bench Jurisdiction,” was filed in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and is available at this link. I find the filing quite effective and compelling, and I thought these passages were especially notable:
On February 13, 2015, the Governor issued a purported reprieve in connection with his publicly-announced assumption of a constitutionally-nonexistent power to declare a “moratorium” on death sentences in Pennsylvania.
This lawless act by the Governor, improperly and inaccurately characterized as a reprieve — for the act issued in this case is not, in fact, a reprieve — is not within the constitutional powers of the Governor, usurps judicial review of criminal judgments, and is in direct violation of his duty to faithfully execute Pennsylvania law under Article IV, § 2. It is unconstitutional, illegal, and should be declared null and void by this Court….
The alleged reprieve, which is not a reprieve at all, violates the constitutional separation of powers. The constitution requires due process, not the Governor’s personal standard of absolute perfection; and the task of assuring that criminal judgments meet that correct standard is assigned to the judiciary, not the executive.Exercise, by another branch, of an extra-constitutional attempt to disturb settled judgments in criminal cases is an impermissible usurpation of the exclusive function of the judiciary….
In law and in reality, therefore, the Governor seeks to nullify valid, final judgments of sentence in usurpation of the judicial function, and seeks to subject the law governing capital sentencing to the test of his personal standard of satisfaction,which in this instance happens to be a test of infallibility that is impossible for mere mortals to satisfy. This is not permissible in a government that is founded on the principle that the people are to be ruled by laws enacted by their representatives in the legislative process, and not the personal whims of a king or dictator. The constitutional role of the Governor is to execute the law, not sabotage it.