Vanguard News Group: “Four people who have spent decades serving mandatory life-without-parole sentences for second-degree murder are asking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to intervene after the state’s highest court declared the sentencing scheme unconstitutional but left more than 1,100 people already serving those sentences without a clear path to relief.

The four petitioners — Lori Ann Lassiter, Cecil Holmes, Marsha Scaggs and John Marshall Payne III — filed separate King’s Bench petitions Thursday asking the Supreme Court to make its March decision in Commonwealth v. Lee retroactive and allow people sentenced under the former mandatory scheme to seek relief.

The filings follow the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s unanimous March 26 ruling in Commonwealth v. Lee, which held that automatically sentencing people convicted of second-degree murder to life without parole without considering their individual culpability constitutes cruel punishment under the Pennsylvania Constitution.

The court emphasized that felony murder encompasses widely varying conduct and degrees of responsibility for a death. Unlike first-degree murder, second-degree murder does not require proof that the accused intended to kill.

“[Felony] murder covers a wide variety of conduct and varying culpability for a killing,” the Supreme Court wrote in Lee, according to the Abolitionist Law Center, which represents the four petitioners.

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Photo by Katherine McAdoo (Unsplash)