Might Pennsylvania’s top court pioneer new constitutional checks on extreme felony murder sentences?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by a notable case recenly accepted for review by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. This recent Bolts article by Victoria Law. This piece should be read in full (like all Bolts pieces), though the full headline covers the essentials: “Pennsylvania Reckons with Its Draconian Laws on Life Imprisonment: Over 1,000 Pennsylvanians are serving life without parole sentences for murders they didn’t themselves commit. The state supreme court agreed to review whether this is constitutional.” Here are excerpts: (with links from the original):

In 2014, [Derek] Lee, then age 29, participated in a burglary in which his accomplice fatally shot the homeowner. Lee had not been involved in the killing and wasn’t even in the room at the time.  Nonetheless, two years later, he was convicted of felony murder, a type of charge that prosecutors can bring against someone who was involved in a crime that led to a death, even if the death was unintentional or the defendant didn’t participate in the killing.

In Pennsylvania, felony murder is classified as second-degree murder, and all convictions for second-degree murder trigger an automatic sentence of life without parole.  These abnormally draconian laws have made Pennsylvania home to near-record numbers of people sentenced to die in prison.  The state has the second-highest number of people serving life without parole, nearly 5,100 people

Life without parole has frequently been proposed as a more humane alternative to the death penalty, but advocates for reform call it “death by incarceration.” Ashley Nellis, senior researcher with the Sentencing Project, points out that LWOP sentences allow for virtually no second chance no matter a person’s transformation or the amount of time that has elapsed.  “The state is killing you, just slower — and for a wider range of offenses or participation in those offenses,” she said.

Nellis points out that the expansion of life without parole has far outpaced the decline in the death penalty. The number of people serving life without parole has jumped 66 percent since her organization began collecting data in 2003, reaching roughly 56,000 people as of a 2021 report by the organization. In Texas, for instance, the number of life without parole sentences has grown as the number of those sentenced to death has dropped. “When you’re looking at a death sentence, you have a capital attorney and [other] special rights given to you because of the seriousness of the sentence,” Nellis noted, but those protections are not available to those facing LWOP.