The Abolitionist Law Center represents Jerome “Hoagie” Coffey, a co-founder of the Human Rights Coalition and activist, in appealing his wrongful conviction in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. Coffey has been incarcerated for 30 years, 14 of which he spent in solitary confinement, for a crime he did not commit and to which he was not linked by any shred of physical evidence.

Coffey’s 1994 conviction, which is currently being appealed, is a case of a corrupt police investigation that fixed the evidence to frame the suspect. Coffey was convicted based on a witness who has since recanted his testimony, a jailhouse snitch, and two eyewitnesses who initially described a suspect who was almost a foot shorter than Coffey. Coffey’s conviction was the product of ineffectiveness of his trial counsel, who failed to appear at a critical hearing, and it was the product of suppressed evidence by the Commonwealth that would have completely changed the outcome of his trial. The suppressed evidence included a statement accusing a witness in Coffey’s trial of having committed the murder himself and framing Coffey in addition to a handwritten note from the night of the murder confirming that one of the eyewitnesses did not know the perpetrators, despite testifying to the contrary at trial. The jury never learned that one of the witnesses who testified against Coffey was accused of committing that murder.

Due to abandonment of appellate counsel and missing transcripts, it took almost twenty years for Mr. Coffey’s direct appeal to be filed and denied. His appellate counsel raised only one issue and abandoned 40 other preserved claims. In 2022, Mr. Coffey’s Amended PCRA was finalized and an evidentiary hearing was held in 2023, where witnesses testified about the police coercion and intimidation that occurred in 1994 and the lack of competent representation Coffey received at that time. In August 2024, Judge Bronson of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas denied Coffey’s first PCRA petition. His attorneys appealed this ruling before the Pennsylvania Superior Court, where briefing was filed and oral argument conducted in October 2025. We are now waiting for the results of that appeal.