READING, Pa.- It’s a sentencing shake-up.<\/p>\n
The state’s highest court is striking down mandatory life sentences for some people convicted of second-degree murder.<\/p>\n
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled mandatory life sentences without parole for those convicted of second-degree murder are unconstitutional.<\/p>\n
The ruling applies to those convicted of second degree murder, where a defendant is not the person accused of carrying out the murder.<\/p>\n
“The people who pulled the trigger, the person who stabbed; those individuals and their convictions and their sentences should not be affected by this ruling,” said Berks County District Attorney John Adams. “It’s the getaway drivers, the accomplices, the lookouts.”<\/p>\n
He says the decision was based off of an Allegheny County case, the Commonwealth vs. Derek Lee.<\/p>\n
Adams says right now, Pennsylvania is one of only two states that allow an accomplice to be sentenced to life without parole. Louisiana is the other.<\/p>\n
“The punishment might be a little out of whack when you have an individual who may have had no knowledge that the actual perpetrator of the crime even had a weapon, yet he could be himself culpable as an accomplice and receive the same penalty,” Adams explained.<\/p>\n
The state’s high court has delayed this decision from being imposed for 120 days.<\/p>\n
Adams says now there’s somewhat of a holding pattern as many wait to see if the state legislature will act.<\/p>\n
“We do fully expect that this decision will be retroactive and will affect all of those individuals who are now incarcerated and serving a life sentence for second degree murder where they themselves were only an accomplice to the crime,” said Adams.<\/p>\n
DA Adams says right now, they are in the process of trying to determine how many cases in Berks County this would affect.<\/p>\n
According to Adams, he doesn’t believe any pending homicide cases fall into that category, but says it is a complicated issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa.- It’s a sentencing shake-up. The state’s highest court is striking down mandatory life sentences for some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,22513,1055,42932,8109,736,128,130,129,26528,5018],"class_list":["post-150463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-county-district-attorney","tag-john-adams","tag-life-sentence","tag-pennsylvania-supreme-court","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-second-degree-murder","tag-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}