Petitioners ask Pa. Supreme Court to make felony murder ruling retroactive

Four defendants serving mandatory life in prison without parole argue their sentences are illegal.

By PAULA REED WARD
TribLive

Four people who have already served decades of their mandatory life sentences for second-degree murder asked the state Supreme Court on Thursday to make retroactive its March decision that declared the mandatory penalty unconstitutional.

In four separate petitions — all seeking what is known as a King’s Bench review by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court — the defendants argue they are currently serving an illegal sentence.

The petitioners say the court’s ruling on second- degree murder, which stemmed from a case in Allegheny County involving a defendant named Derek Lee, must be applied to all people in the commonwealth who are serving life for second-degree, or felony, murder.

There are roughly 1,100 people in prison for felony murder in Pennsylvania.

“Each day the retroactivity question remains unresolved prolongs this unjust situation,” the petitioners wrote. “Unless Lee is applied retroactively, more than 1,000 individuals will continue serving sentences that the commonwealth is now proscribed from imposing.”

In March, the court ruled unanimously that mandatory life for second-degree murder — the killing of a person during the commission of a serious felony — violates the state’s prohibition on cruel punishment.

It does so by failing to distinguish between the person who commits the killing and a person who played a lesser role, such as being a lookout or getaway driver, the court found.

To comply with the Constitution, the justices wrote that a sentencing judge must make an individualized determination based on the defendant before them.

The court stayed its decision for 120 days to give the state legislature the opportunity to amend the law moving forward.

The state Senate proposed a bill to set a minimum sentence of 35 years to life for a person convicted of second- degree murder. A bill proposed in the state House would make a defendant eligible for parole after serving 30 years.

Neither piece of legislation has advanced. That stagnation has triggered groups such as the Abolitionist Law Center, the Pennsylvania Innocence Project and Philadelphia law firm Phillips Black to file the King’s Bench requests.

“The question of retroactivity is purely legal and requires immediate statewide guidance from this court,” they wrote.

The state constitution grants the Supreme Court so-called King’s Bench authority — the power to take up any case in a lower court or when it “sees the need to address an issue of ‘immediate public importance,’ “according to the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts. It is rarely used.

Pennsylvania’s Common Pleas Court judges, knowing that mandatory life is no longer allowed for second- degree murder, have attempted to address the matter by using the suggested legislation as guidance.

In Allegheny County earlier this month, a judge ordered a man convicted of second-degree to serve 35 years to life.

But the petitioners argue that the state Supreme Court must act to address those already imprisoned.

“Lee did not merely alter the procedures governing the imposition of second-degree murder sentences,” the defendants said. “Rather, it withdrew the commonwealth’s authority to impose a mandatory life without parole sentence in second-degree murder cases.”

Lee, 37, of Penn Hills was convicted of second-degree murder in connection with an Oct. 14, 2014, home invasion in Pittsburgh’s Elliot neighborhood.

Investigators said Lee and a co-defendant entered a home and demanded money from a man and his girlfriend. Lee ordered the two into the basement, and then he went upstairs in the home, leaving his co-defendant with the man. When the man tried to lunge, the woman testified at trial, the co-defendant fatally shot him.

Both men were found guilty of second-degree murder. Lee appealed his conviction, and, in October 2024, the state Supreme Court heard arguments and later ordered Lee to be resentenced.

‘Fundamental inequity’

Although new defendants’ sentences for felony murder can be handled on a case-bycase basis going forward, the petitioners argue something must be done for those whose sentences are now illegal.

As of July, there were 128 such defendants from Allegheny County.

The defendants who filed the four King’s Bench petitions have all been incarcerated for more than 30 years, and all of them played a lesser role in the homicides for which they were convicted.

They include:

• Lori Ann Lassiter, 62, who was convicted in Philadelphia following a bench trial in October 1989. While she has consistently maintained her innocence, under the prosecution’s theory of the case, she initiated a robbery for William “Ricky” Carter. During the robbery on Sept. 18, 1988, police said Carter shot and killed Eddie Byrd, a cab driver. In her petition, Lassiter notes that she was never alleged to have fired a weapon or even been armed. She has been incarcerated for more than 38 years.

• John Marshall Payne III, 70, who was convicted by a jury for the 1981 death of Elsie Rishel, 90, during a burglary at her home in York. Payne has consistently maintained he was not involved in the crime, his petition said, but was identified by three witnesses at trial — despite physical evidence from the scene, including blood, fingerprints and hair analysis that could not be tied to Payne. He has been incarcerated for more than 39 years.

• Marsha Scaggs, 62, who was convicted in Lawrence County in 1988. The victim in the case, the petition said, was believed to be a police informant. At the scene, her attorneys wrote, Scaggs’ co-defendant handed her a gun, and while pointing his own gun at her, ordered Scaggs to shoot the victim. She refused, and the co-defendant killed him. Scaggs has been incarcerated nearly 40 years. She now has severe liver damage that has led to seven hospitalizations this year, her attorneys wrote.

• Cecil Holmes, 70, who was convicted in Philadelphia after prosecutors said he acted as an unarmed lookout during an attempted robbery on May 13, 1979, in which Joseph Melvin, a cab driver, was fatally stabbed. Holmes has been in prison for 46 years and now has advanced dementia, his lawyers wrote.

In each court filing, the attorneys laid out how the defendants have spent their incarceration. All of them have gone decades without any prison misconducts, the petitions said, and have worked to better themselves through programs, education, working and mentoring others.

To allow the defendants to remain serving an unconstitutional sentence, the petitions said, “would be a monumental injustice.”

More than that, they continued, it presents a “fundamental inequity.”

The petitions note that retroactive application will require full resentencing for everyone in Pennsylvania serving life without parole for felony murder. However, that administrative burden does not outweigh the need to conform to constitutional requirements, they wrote.

“The alternative — permitting individuals to remain imprisoned under sentences the Constitution no longer authorizes and that have been expressly deemed to be ‘cruel’—would undermine, rather than promote, the fair administration of justice,” they said.

That result, they continued, would be not only “unjust but unconscionable.”