For nearly 14 years, I have been representing post-conviction petitioners. I regularly receive calls from inmate petitioners, or their loved one, asking me whether I can help them get back into court to challenge their convictions. Generally, when a case has gets to be years beyond the time the judgment became final, or where there are multiple prior post-conviction petitions that have been filed, I can pretty quickly discern that there is going to be little that I can do. That’s because Pennsylvania’s Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) is pretty strict in requiring that petitions for post-conviction relief be filed in a timely manner—within one year of the judgment becoming final or within one year of the triggering of an exception to the one-year deadline.
Recently, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court took the occasion to hand down a decision, which addresses one of the exceptions to the one-year deadline under the PCRA. The exception is known as the newly- discovered-facts exception. The exception reads this way:
(1) Any petition under this subchapter, including a second or subsequent petition, shall be filed within one year of the date the judgment becomes final, unless the petition alleges and the petitioner proves that:
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(ii) the facts upon which the claim is predicated were unknown to the petitioner and could not have been ascertained by the exercise of due diligence;
To trigger this exception and to get back into court more than a year after a criminal judgment becomes final, a petitioner must plead facts that were previously unknown to them (i.e. new) and they must demonstrate how these facts could not have been discovered earlier through “the exercise of due diligence.”
In the case that the Supreme Court just decided, Commonwealth v. Brown, the petitioner, Jamie Brown, pled that he had recently discovered that another inmate, Tusweet Smith, had confessed to another inmate that Tusweet was the person who actually killed a police officer that Brown was tried and convicted for. Previously, Brown knew that Tusweet had made a confession to being the killer, and he unsuccessfully sought post-conviction relief years prior on that basis when Tusweet first confessed. But now he sought to come back into court because of this same confession but to a different person.
Of course, the Commonwealth pushed back against this attempt to get back into court, arguing that what Brown is offering is really nothing new at all. From the Commonwealth’s perspective, Brown is simply rehashing previously known facts—Tusweet’s confession—but now from a different source. In that respect, the Commonwealth said this was not a new fact at all to trigger the newly-discovered-facts exception. But the Supreme Court saw it differently. It said this:
The Commonwealth asserts that the “fact upon which the claim is predicated” is the fact that Tusweet Smith confessed to the murder. Not so. The fact that Tusweet Smith confessed to Zambory on January 14, 2005, is separate and distinct from the fact that Tusweet Smith independently confessed to another person (Dorsett) at another time. The previously known fact is that Tusweet Smith confessed to Zambory. The new and previously unknown fact is that Tusweet Smith confessed to Dorsett. A different confession, to a different individual, at a different time, necessarily is a distinct fact for purposes of Section 9545(b)(1)(ii). Tusweet Smith’s confession to Dorsett is not a new source of a previously known fact, but a newly discovered fact entirely.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court went on to curb one of its prior cases, Commonwealth v. Yarris, to clarify that there is no categorical rule against third-party confessions like the sort at play here. It said:
Yarris does not stand for the proposition that a third-party confession can never be a newly discovered fact. Under the plain language of Section 9545(b)(1), such a fact can constitute a newly discovered fact so long as the petitioner alleges and proves the existence of this predicate fact, that it was previously unknown, and that it could not have been ascertained earlier by the exercise of due diligence.
Effectively, the Supreme Court got back to statutory basics in Brown. The newly-discovered-facts exception, 42 Pa.C.S. § 9545(b)(1)(ii), simply asks only whether a previously unknown fact exists and whether it could have been discovered earlier. It does not concern itself with whether the fact is persuasive, credible, corroborated, or ultimately dispositive. Those questions belong somewhere else.
The Court makes that sequencing explicit in one of the most important passages in the opinion:
The function of the timeliness exception is to open the courthouse door to post-conviction petitioners and to afford them the opportunity to prove that they are actually innocent or are serving illegal sentences. The bar to open the door is not the same as the bar to obtain relief. Once the petitioner alleges and proves that there is a previously unknown fact upon which a claim is predicated and that that fact could not have been obtained earlier, the door to the courthouse opens and the petitioner has the opportunity to establish the elements of the underlying claim.
This is the corrective move in Brown. Courts had been using disbelief as a jurisdictional tool—deciding, implicitly, that a third-party confession “wasn’t enough” because of hearsay concerns before allowing the petitioner to prove anything at all. Brown now rejects that approach. Jurisdiction comes first. Merits come later.
Decisions like Brown clarify the narrow circumstances under which PCRA claims may proceed outside the one-year deadline. For practitioners and clients alike, understanding those limits is critical. If you are navigating post-conviction issues or appellate review in Pennsylvania, experienced guidance can make the difference.