May 2025 Docket Review
This month, the Court issued 6 (maybe 7) precedential opinions and 4 allocatur grants. On the opinion side, I’m most interested in Shifflet, which holds that consideration of a prior acceptance of a DUI-related alternative rehabilitative disposition, or ARD, as a prior offense for purposes of sentencing violates a defendant’s federal constitutional right to a jury trial. First, the case involves an interesting legal issue. For most of history, courts considered all sorts of facts in determining what sentences to impose. However, with the rise of sentencing guidelines and, particularly, fact-triggered mandatory minimum and maximum sentences, defendants began arguing that legislatures were essentially creating aggravated offenses with liability decided after the verdict. In the early part of the century, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, but left one relic of its earlier regime in place: the fact of a prior conviction need not be presented to and found by a jury. That holding doesn’t fit neatly in the new regime, but everyone in the system likes it. Defense attorneys and their clients like not having to deal with evidence of their prior criminality being presented to a jury. Prosecutors like a lighter burden and the certainty of a judicial finding of a prior conviction where there is one. Judges like not having to deal with the evidentiary issues raised by presenting that evidence to a jury. Part of Shifflet is about whether the Legislature can make ARD sufficiently similar to a conviction to invoke (really, expand) this exception to the general rule. And the Court says no, but not without its dissenters.
But more broadly, Shifflet is about competing conceptions about what ARD is. Formally, it is essentially nothing. Defendants waive their constitutional rights and accept sanctions in exchange for avoiding an official adjudication and other sanctions. But functionally, it can either function, as defense counsel would prefer, a mulligan, or, as prosecutors would prefer, as a special dispensation. If the former, it makes no sense to punish someone who has a prior DUI-related ARD as a repeat offender: this is his first “true” DUI. If the latter, it does: this is really his second. One effect of Shifflet is that the former wins out in practice for now.
But while the case certainly improvdes the position of serial DUI defendants as of today, its downstream effects may cut the other way. It is not ridiculous to think the Legislature might simply add a defendant’s prior conviction or acceptance of ARD as an element of an aggravated offense. If so, evidence of defendants’ prior DUIs will be admissible, courts will reasonably differ on how to deal with resulting prejudice via jury instructions, severance, and so on, and the end result may be more, and more deliberatively suspect, convictions and guilty pleas. And at a minimum, one suspects that prosecutors who view ARD as special dispensation will be more stingy with it in the future. All of which is to say this: the Court in Shifflet appears focused on getting the right answer, whatever the downstream effects. At least in this author’s opinion, that’s a testament to its independence and its observance of its constitutional role. It is probably a good year to recognize that.
On the allocatur side, I’m very interested in King, in which the Court is poised to address the phenomenon of de facto life sentences in the context of the Pennsylvania constitutional prohibition on cruel punishments. This allocatur grant comes some years after the Court attempted to apply U.S. Supreme Court precedent seeming to limit permanent imprisonment of juvenile offenders, but, as it was deveoping a cogent framework to do so, had the proverbial rug pulled out from under it by subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decisions limiting that rubric altogether. Given the Court’s experience in this regard, as well as its markedly more protective approach toward juvenile offenders than adult ones, it would not be surprising to see some of those thoughts find a home in Pennsylania constitutional jurisprudence, where the Court has the final say.
Also interesting is the Court’s per curiam order in Alexander, in which the Court thoughtfully explains what, precisely, a per curiam order is and the role of the Prothonotary in response to some fairly wacky arguments about the value of per curiam orders in one of the last 2020-election-dispute cases still being litigated. Notably, the Court also later imposed a filing restriction on one of the litigants involved. The order is a good read for anyone who wants a look behind the curtain into how the court functions when it speaks as a body.
And just for fun, speaking of filing restrictions, I’ve also included below the a Superior Court panel’s decision in Scheibe, which admonishes a Pike County court for imposing a “wet signature” requirement as a precondition to filing, in this case to filing a complaint on the edge of a statute of limitations. One of the longstanding precepts is that state procedural rules govern, and that while county-level courts are free to adopt local rules, they cannot conflict with state rules, and they cannot form the basis for refusing a document altogether. Suffice it to say that this rule is not always honored, and the adoption of local rules and practices as filing requirments sometimes makes practice significantly more difficult for out-of-town attorneys. This author, for example, has encountered in-person-only filing rules, “wet signature” requirements, and even one county in which the court’s default practice was to require counsel to travel to chambers, pick up a completed order, and walk it down a hallway to the Clerk of Courts office for filing, all of which can become procedural traps and, in any event, make it exceptionally more time consuming or costly to litigate. Scheibe is an excellent explanation of the lay of the land and an excellent reminder that the Unified Judicial System is supposed to be, at the end of the day, a unified judicial system, at least when disunion would put litigants out of court.
Precedential Opinions
Commonwealth v. Thomas E. Proctor Heirs Trust, 31 EAP 2023 (Opinion by Mundy, J.) (holding that an agent’s repurchase of its principal’s property at a tax sale effected a redemption of the principal’s interest, rather than a title wash, under a 19th century statute regarding unseated land)*
Commonwealth v. Muhammad, 109 MAP 2023 (affirming a judgment of sentence in the context of a verdict arguably impeached by a special interrogatory)
Firearm Owners Against Crime v. Paris, 32 MAP 2023 (Opinion by Mundy, J.) (holding that firearms purchasers were entitled to proceed on claims for declaratory relief regarding the Commonwealth’s alleged understaffing of its firearms background check system)
Steets v. Celebration Fireworks, Inc., 3 MAP 2024 (Opinion by Donohue, J.) (overruling earlier decisions and holding that workers’ compensation specific loss benefits survive a workers death and are recoverable by her estate)
See also Dissenting Opinion by Wecht, J.
Commonwealth v. Shifflet, 26 MAP 2024 (Opinion by Todd, C.J.) (holding that a trial court’s consideration of a defendant’s prior acceptance of alternative rehabilitative disposition as a “prior offense” giving rise to an increased sentence violates the federal constitutional right to a jury trial)
See also Dissenting Opinion by Dougherty, J.
See also Dissenting Opinion by Mundy, J.
See also Dissenting Opinion by Brobson, J.
Pottstown Sch. Dist. v. Montgomery Cnty. Bd. of Assessment, 95 MAP 2023 (Opinion by Todd, C.J.) (holding a Pottstown hospital was a purely public charity and entitled to a property-tax exemption)
Commonwealth v. Johnson, 810 CAP (Opinion by Dougherty, J.) (rejecting numerous issues in a capital PCRA appeal)
See also Dissenting Opinion by Mundy, J.
Allocatur Grants
Schmidt v. PennDOT, 561 MAL 2024 (granting review to consider whether a dangerous condition above Commonwealth real property is a dangerous condition of that property for purposes of the real estate exception to the Sovereign Immunity Act)
Commonwealth v. Adams, 609 MAL 2024 (granting review to consider the admissibility of belatedly disclosed expert opinion testimony)
Commonwealth v. King, 562 MAL 2024 (granting review to consider challenges to a de facto life sentence for a juvenile offender as violative of the Pennsylvania constitutional prohibition on cruel punishment)
Khalil v. Mary Jane Home Enrichment Ctr., Inc., 355 EAL 2024 (granting review to consider the appealability of a series of interlocutory orders including an order denying reconsideration under the collateral order rule)
Other
In re: Alexander v. Delaware Cnty. Bd. of Elections, 49 MM 2025 (Per Curiam Order) (explaining the Court’s general procedures in making per curiam dispositions)
Scheibe v. Woodloch Resort, 1478 EDA 2024 (Pa. Super.) (Opinion by Lane, J.) (admonishing common pleas courts for adopting and enforcing rules in conflict with state rules, in particular a “wet signature” rule)
*This author was counsel for amici curiae oil and gas title professionals who filed a brief in support of the Proctor Heirs Trust.
