Pa. Supreme Court to decide whether ban on mandatory life terms for second-degree murder is retroactive
September 29, 2026
The Philadelphia Inquirer: “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to decide whether its March ruling striking down automatic sentences of life without parole for second-degree murder applies to the people already serving them.
The high court will rule in the case of Jerome Coffey, a Philadelphia man convicted in a 1992 killing in which prosecutors said a group of men posing as law enforcement officers boxed in a man’s car and shot him.
The court’s decision will reach well beyond Coffey. It will settle whether roughly 1,100 people — including more than 500 convicted in Philadelphia — can ask judges for new sentences, or will remain bound by a punishment the state’s highest court has ruled unconstitutional.
In a unanimous decision in March, the justices said Pennsylvania’s mandatory life sentence for second-degree murder violates the state constitution’s ban on cruel punishments….
No physical evidence tied Coffey to the killing, his lawyers have said, and a key prosecution witness recanted before trial. The lawyers also said prosecutors withheld evidence that could have helped Coffey, but state Superior Court rejected those contentions.
And on Tuesday, the state Supreme Court declined to review them, limiting the scope of his appeal to the sentencing question alone.
Even so, Bret Grote, the legal director of the Abolitionist Law Center, which represents Coffey, praised the court’s decision to hear the case.
‘This is what those who have been serving this sentence have been waiting for,’ said Grote, who also represented Derek Lee, the Pittsburgh man whose appeal of his life sentence for his second-degree murder conviction led to the court’s decision in March.”