three-judge Superior Court panel overturned Brennan\u2019s order in July 2026<\/a> and defense attorneys sought a review by the entire Superior Court.<\/p>\nThat review was denied last month and the trio have now filed petitions for allowance of appeal to the state Supreme Court to determine whether the Superior Court erred in its conclusions.<\/p>\n
New filings<\/p>\n
In a new filing from New Jersey-based Centurion, representing Grasty, attorneys Paul Casteleiro and Kimberly Weston make many of the same arguments that the petitioners pitched for the full Superior Court review: That the majority of the three-judge panel misconstrued Brennan\u2019s findings and largely ignored the importance of expert testimony at the PCRA hearings in concluding the newly presented evidence was simply \u201cmore of the same\u201d that was available at trial.<\/p>\n
Brennan noted in an opinion accompanying her order that a jury could reach a different conclusion based on that evidence, which she found established that Nickens was likely killed and raped at or around the same time by a single unidentified person.<\/p>\n
This was due to a large amount of semen matched to an unknown male found in Nickens\u2019 rectum that had not liquefied or leaked out prior to her death, as well as a stain on a bedsheet reexamined in 2021 that found the victim\u2019s blood, the unknown male\u2019s semen and what was likely urine from the victim had attached to and dried on the sheet at the same time.<\/p>\n
Further bolstering this argument was the fact that no DNA from any of the defendants was found at the scene, while other DNA matched to \u201cUnknown Male 1\u201d was also found on an XXXL green jacket and a chewed cocaine straw in a jacket pocket that had been left behind, Brennan found. Additional testing of that jacket identified \u201cUM1\u201d as the \u201chabitual wearer\u201d due to advances in testing for \u201ctouch DNA,\u201d or scant traces of DNA.<\/p>\n
The jacket is of particular evidentiary value due to that new finding and the prosecution trying to tie it to two of the defendants at their trials, the petitioners argued. Combined with all of the other evidence and the credible expert testimony at the PCRA hearings, defense attorneys argue the new evidence is of a \u201chigher grade or character\u201d than what was previously available.<\/p>\n
Brennan appeared to agree in 2024.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis new evidence would have allowed petitioner to make a strong, scientifically based argument that the murder was committed by a single perpetrator and he was not involved,\u201d she wrote in opinions for each of the three men. \u201cThis single perpetrator defense was not available to petitioner at his trial. The court finds that the new DNA results, if adopted by a jury, would likely compel a different verdict.\u201d<\/p>\n
The petitioners argue that the Superior Court wrongly contended that \u201cthe\u201d defense of a single perpetrator was available at time of trial, rather than \u201cthis\u201d single perpetrator as Brennan had written.<\/p>\n
The Superior Court additionally found Brennan based her decision on the PCRA testimony rather than the entire record, despite Brennan\u2019s statement that she conducted an \u201cexhaustive review\u201d of the \u201cfull record\u201d in reaching her conclusions.<\/p>\n
Attorneys for the defendants additionally argue that the Superior Court appeared to base its decision to overturn Brennan\u2019s order largely on inculpatory testimony at trial while ignoring the credibility of those witnesses, many of whom were teenagers facing their own serious charges or who had been questioned long after the murder took place.<\/p>\n
The jury foreman in Chappell\u2019s case also noted that one witness, a low-IQ 15-year-old who claimed to have acted as lookout for the defendants, could not have seen the rear of Nickens\u2019 apartment from where he claimed to have been standing.<\/p>\n
The prior appeal for a full court review indicated the majority of the Superior Court had also impermissibly co-mingled evidence presented at different trials to reach the same conclusion for all three defendants.<\/p>\n
Supporting brief<\/p>\n
The Innocence Network, in a supporting brief for Chappell, noted that after-discovered evidence is cumulative only if it is \u201cof the same character and to the same material point\u201d as the evidence at trial.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvidence of a \u2018different and \u201chigher\u201d grade or character, though upon the same point,\u2019 is not cumulative,\u201d the brief stated. \u201cWhether new evidence would likely produce a different verdict depends on \u2018the totality of all of the trial circumstances.\u2019 The Superior Court majority quoted both standards, but applied neither, evaluating the new evidence one item at a time without considering its cumulative impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
That brief, from Ballard Spahr attorneys Thomas W. Hazlett, Stephanie Morriss, Karli Tellis and Erin Blasberg, along with Katherine H. Judson of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Science, provided the example of several blind men each touching a different part of an elephant and coming to the wrong conclusion about what animal it was.<\/p>\n
In context, the brief argues the jury trial \u201ctouched\u201d the fact that the DNA came from a single unknown male, but the prosecution offered various explanations, such as Nickens maybe having a boyfriend who deposited semen in her rectum earlier, or the possibility that the DNA was somehow planted by the defendants or left afterward by a necrophiliac.<\/p>\n
It went on to say that the Superior Court \u201ctouched\u201d on the DNA inside Nickens body, the DNA on the sheet and the DNA on the jacket and straw individually, then wrongly reached the conclusion that each was simply \u201cmore of the same\u201d without connecting them to the whole \u201canimal.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNeither necrophilia, nor a planted sample, accounts for the jacket and the straw, and a \u2018fourth person\u2019 theory cannot account for finding only that fourth person anywhere at the scene,\u201d the brief stated. \u201cThe Commonwealth responded that the jacket carried none of Ms. Nickens\u2019 DNA, so its owner likely did not wear it during the assault. Taken alone, the jacket proves little; alongside the other DNA evidence, it becomes highly compelling. That is the parable\u2019s lesson: No single item proves the case, but together, the items leave no room for the Commonwealth\u2019s theories.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Innocence Network brief additionally points to the Superior Court dismissing the absence of the petitioners\u2019 DNA with the maxim that \u201can absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,\u201d but notes that the same court held in the 2025 case of Commonwealth v. Hardy that that maxim is not universally true.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf one finds an absence of evidence in a place where the evidence certainly would be expected to be found, then the absence of that evidence can be suggestive of absence,\u201d the court found in that case.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Commonwealth\u2019s theory was that three men entered a small apartment and beat a 70-year-old woman to death with their fists,\u201d the brief states. \u201cThe crime scene expert testified that if she had been killed that way, the assailants\u2019 trace DNA would be expected on items such as her dress and sheets. The same modern testing that repeatedly found one man\u2019s DNA found none of theirs, and, under Hardy, that absence should not have been dismissed as the Superior Court did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unlike other appeals courts, the Supreme Court may choose the cases it decides to hear. Attorney David Hasse with Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP, who has been working on Chappell\u2019s case for years, said the attorneys might expect a decision within about four to six months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three men who maintain their innocence in the 1997 murder of 70-year-old Henrietta Nickens have asked the Pennsylvania…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[211,46,212,182,139,28,30,29,210],"class_list":["post-323689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-chester","tag-courts","tag-delaware-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-top-stories-dtd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323689","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=323689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}