Vanguard News Group: “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Thursday struck down one of the nation’s most severe sentencing laws, ruling that the state’s requirement of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for all second-degree murder convictions is unconstitutional, a decision that could reshape the legal futures of more than 1,000 people and force lawmakers to confront the limits of punishment in the state’s criminal legal system.

In a 70-page opinion issued in Commonwealth v. Derek Lee, the court held that a mandatory life-without-parole sentence for felony murder violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s prohibition on cruel punishment because it fails to account for individual culpability.

At the center of the ruling is a fundamental legal principle: punishment must be proportionate not only to the crime, but to the person who committed it. The court found that Pennsylvania’s sentencing scheme — which imposes the same punishment on all individuals convicted of second-degree murder regardless of their role in the offense — ‘poses too great a risk of disproportionate punishment’ and is therefore unconstitutional….

‘This ruling represents the culmination of decades of movement-building by incarcerated people and their families and communities,’ said Bret Grote, legal director of the Abolitionist Law Center. ‘The movement to end [life without parole] has forced an epochal transformation in state constitutional jurisprudence.'”

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