March 2026 Docket Review
This month, the Court issued 10 precedential opinions and 7 allocatur grants.
On the opinion side, the biggest headline is clearly Lee, in which the Court held that Pennsylvania’s mandatory sentence of life imprisonment for felony murder violates Article I, Section 13 of the Pennsylvania Constitution’s ban on cruel punishments. The majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice Todd, conducts an exceptionally thorough and clear Edmunds analysis, identifying key distinctions between the Eighth Amendment and Pennsylvania’s constitutional counterpart: essentially, whereas the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments” was originally intended to prohibit those which are grossly excessive and out of step with common-law tradition, Pennsylvania’s earlier-adopted prohibition on “cruel punishments” was intended to embrace Enlightenment-era liberal and Quaker views that punishments beyond that which were necessary to accomplish society’s legitimate penological goals - chief among them rehabilitation and deterrence - were the functional equivalent of tyranny. Against this backdrop, the Court explained, a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment, with no inquiry into its necessity, falls short of what Article I, Section 13 requires. As to remedy, the Court directed that the defendant be resentenced to life imprisonment with or without the possibility of parole, based upon an individualized determination of the proportionality of his sentence to penological goals. However, consistent with other decisions that might call out for a legislative fix, the Court stayed its order for 120 days to give the General Assembly the opportunity to adopt curative legislation.
The opinion will have significant ripple effects. First, it calls into question the validity of roughly 1,000 felony murder offenders’ sentences. Although the Court’s opinion did not address whether it was retroactive (a petitioner under the PCRA will have to litigate that issue), given earlier decisions recognizing similar Eighth Amendment decisions as substantive in nature, it is difficult to imagine anything else. Concurrently, it creates a legislative question. The General Assembly might adopt a statute giving trial courts the discretion to sentence felony murder offenders to life imprisonment with or without the possibility of parole, and adopt any number of relevant tests or factors. It might adopt a statute simply requiring the possibility of parole and leaving the issue of release to the parole board. It might do nothing, and simply let the Court’s decision come to pass. And whatever happens, there will be questions to answer about questions the Court left undecided about other offenses, what precisely proportionality requires, and what qualifies as a legitimate penological goal, to say nothing of the import of retroactivity and ex post facto doctrine. Lee is likely to mark not only the end of mandatory life imprisonment without parole, but also the beginning of a fundamental constitutional paradigm shift in Pennsylvania sentencing law.
One other point: the court’s decision is the latest in a series of its originalist decisions that come to what some would call progressive outcomes. There is a feeling in legal circles, partially because originalism was popularized by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, that courts’ consideration of original intent necessarily leads to politically conservative outcomes. It doesn’t. In fact, it didn’t always even in Justice Scalia’s hands: the Court’s grants of allocatur in Bloom and Jackson this month are part the ongoing line of cases arising from Justice Scalia’s originalist reformation of the Confrontation Clause into a meaningful constitutional right. And it definitely doesn’t in the context of Pennsylvania’s Constitution, the first of which was the product of radical Englightenment liberals who had just shaken off British colonial rule and were amidst a war with their former government to keep it shaken off. That they had, and protected, ardently liberal and individualistic conceptions of things like democratic rights, or, here, the degree to which state power might be exercised against individuals who had committed crimes, should not come as a significant surprise. That we live in an era society is generally viewed as more progressive than the era of three-cornered hats, but is not always so, might be a more unexpected observation.
In addition to Lee, the court has issued a series of impactful criminal cases this month. In Belgrave, the Court addresses a particularly egregious instance of prosecutorial misconduct, and, in Arnett, the Court identifies that claims that non-punitive sexual offender registration and notification laws are unconstitutional are not cognizable under the Post Conviction Relief Act. Although this might seem like a boon for prosecutors, it may actually be something of a doggle. Claims not cognizable under the PCRA are not subject to its time-bar provisions, and are likely cognizable via ordinary civil litigation and/or more traditional forms of collateral relief like writs of coram nobis and habeas corpus. Which is to say that while Arnett seems to make challenging sex offender statutes more difficult, it may actually make it easier.
Apart from the criminal docket, I’m most interested this month in J.S., which held that the sexual abuse exception to statutory governmental immunity applies only to the sexual abuse of children. Functionally, the decision rests on statutory text that defines the exception by reference to crimes identified in another statute. The trick is that the other statute describes that it applies to offenses perpetrated against a minor. Thus, the argument for more expansive scope is that while the statute refers to crimes against children, the crimes identified in the other statute do not. In an opinion authored by Justice McCaffery, the Court resolves the question textually, but offers significant discussion of legislative history, which evinced that the Legislature was primarily motivated by rampant child sexual abuse and primarily aimed to curb it. In a concurring and dissenting opinion, Justice Wecht, joined by Justice Brobson, takes issue with the majority’s consideration of that legislative history as gratuitous. The decision is interesting less for its holding, and more for the difference of opinion as to whether and when to consider legislative history, with the Justices in the majority taking a more eclectic approach and the Justices in concurrence taking a decidedly more formal one. Litigants in future statutory interpretation cases would be well advised to cover the waterfront of analytical approaches.
On the allocatur side, the Court is quite interested in hearsay issues this month. As noted above, both Bloom and Jackson involve application of U.S. Supreme Court precedents implicating a criminal defendant’s right to confront declarants of testimonial hearsay used in Court, both in the context of expert witnesses who rely on other experts’ statements. Early applications sidestepped the problem by adopting a fiction that forensic scientists’ statements were not testimonial because they were not prepared principally for, well, forensic purposes. But in 2024, the United States Supreme Court decided Smith v. Arizona, 602 U.S. 779 (2024), which undermined that reasoning. Bloom and Jackson will undoubtedly identify Smith’s impact on Pennsylvania law. Similarly, in Perez, the Court will consider the admissibility of child-victim statements made in the context of forensic sexual assault interviews. These statements have generally been found to be admissible on similar fictive grounds, and are in some cases, largely merely conduits to allow victim testimony without the need of live testimony subject to confrontation. It will be interesting to see how the Court deals with the changing framework in both contexts.
Precedential Opinions
Commonwealth v. Lee, 3 WAP 2024 (Opinion by Todd, C.J.) (holding a mandatory sentence of imprisonment without the possibility of parole for felony murder violates the Pennsylvania constitutional prohibition on cruel punishments)
See also Concurring Opinion by Dougherty, J.
See also Concurring Opinion by Wecht, J.
See also Concurring Opinion by Mundy, J.
In the Interest of G.G.B., 35 WAP 2024 (Opinion by Dougherty, J.) (holding venue for a child-dependency proceeding is proper in the county where the subject child resides or is present, as compared to where a parent resides)
Commonwealth v. Belgrave, 31 WAP 2024 (Opinion by Wecht, J.) (holding a prosecutor’s misconduct in calling an immunized but recalcitrant defendant to the stand constituted reversible error)
Commonwealth v. Johnson, 813 CAP (Opinion by Wecht, J.) (affirming denial of postconviction relief in a capital case)
See also Dissenting Opinion by Donohue, J.
City of Phila. v. J.S., 34 EAP 2024 (Opinion by McCaffery, J.) (holding sexual abuse exception to governmental immunity applies only to child sexual abuse)
See also Concurring Opinion by Wecht, J.
Erie Ins. Prop. & Cas. Co. v. Heater (W.C.A.B.), 103 MAP 2024 (Opinion by Todd, C.J.) (holding workers’ compensation statute requiring employee to give notice of work-related injury to employer within 120 days does not require a sole owner-employee to give notice to his carrier within that period)
Commonwealth v. Arnett, 19 MAP 2023 (Opinion by Wecht, J.) (holding challenges to non-punitive sexual offender registration and notification statutes are not cognizable under the PCRA)
Pa. Cannabis Coalition v. 23rd Jud. Dist., 73 MAP 2024 (Opinion by Mundy, J.) (holding cannabis-industry group lacked standing to challenge judicial district’s rules regarding cannabis use by treatment-court participants)
See also Dissenting Opinion by Donohue, J.
Bredbenner v. Hall, 53 MAP 2024 (involving burden of proof in the context of contempt of court for failure to pay child support)
Halpern v. Ricoh U.S.A., Inc., 7 EAP 2024 (Opinion by Brobson, J.) (holding that a consumer challenging a deceptive omission under the Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law must demonstrate that the vendor had an affirmative duty to disclose the subject of the omission)
See also Dissenting Opinion by Wecht, J.
Allocatur Grants
Golden Eagle Resources II, LLC v. EQT Production Co., 173 WAL 2025 et al. (granting review to consider the enforceability of arbitration, service-of-suit, and right-to-forum provisions in the same commercial contract)
Commonwealth v. Clegg, 293 EAL 2025 (granting review of a sufficiency of the evidence claim and whether the intermediate appellate court quorum requirement applies in the context of Supreme-Court remand decisions)
S.K. v. Pa. Dept. of Educ., 533 MAL 2025 (granting review to consider whether affidavits of probable cause are competent evidence to establish that a teacher has been charged with crimes for purposes of the Educator Discipline Act)
Commonwealth v. Bloom, 250 WAL 2025 (granting review to consider the impact of a U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that the Confrontation Clause bars surrogate expert testimony based on another expert’s testimonial statements)
Commonwealth v. Wyant, 260 WAL 2025 (granting review to consider whether the exception to the time-bar provision of the PCRA for claims the government has prevented the petition from raising requires a demonstration that the petition exercised due diligence to ascertain the information)
Commonwealth v. Perez, 387 EAL 2025 (granting review to consider the admissibility of child witness statements to physicians during forensic interviews)
Commonwealth v. Jackson, 557 MAL 2025 (granting review to consider the impact of a U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that the Confrontation Clause bars surrogate expert testimony based on another expert’s testimonial statements)
