The criminal information is the document that tells a defendant what he is on trial for. In Pennsylvania, it is filed after the preliminary hearing or grand jury and lists each offense the Commonwealth intends to prove. The Sixth Amendment and Article I, Section 9 of the Pennsylvania Constitution both guarantee formal notice of the charges, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has said that right is so basic it cannot be waived — not even by a defendant who voluntarily submits to the court’s jurisdiction. Commonwealth v. Jones, 929 A.2d 205, 211-12 (Pa. 2007).
So what happens when a jury convicts a defendant of a crime the information never listed?
In Commonwealth v. Blackston, 2026 PA Super 194 (Pa. Super. filed Sept. 2, 2026) (Lane, J., joined by Panella, P.J.E., and Bender, P.J.E.), the Superior Court affirmed a conviction for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder — the only count the jury returned — even though the Commonwealth’s information charged murder and four firearms offenses and nothing else. The court held the defendant had notice anyway, and it found that notice in the history of a guilty plea he later withdrew.
How the Charge Went Missing
Michael Blackston was charged in 2019 in connection with a 2011 Philadelphia shooting. The criminal complaint listed murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and four firearms offenses. After a grand jury indictment, the Commonwealth filed its information in January 2020, and the conspiracy count was not on it.
Nobody caught the omission until August 2022, when Blackston appeared for a guilty plea. The deal was an open plea to third-degree murder, conspiracy to commit third-degree murder, and one firearms count, with the rest to be nolle prossed. The trial court asked where the conspiracy charge came from, since it wasn’t in the information. The prosecutor explained it had been added during plea negotiations. The court then added the charge to the information from the bench, on its own motion, with no objection from the defense. Blackston pleaded guilty to it.
Before sentencing, he moved to withdraw the plea. The court granted the motion and ordered that “all previously nolle prossed charges are reinstated.” Two years later, on the morning of trial, Blackston was formally arraigned and pleaded not guilty to each charge read to him, including “conspiracy to commit murder.” He raised no objection. The jury acquitted him of murder and the firearms counts and convicted him of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. The sentence was twenty to forty years.
On appeal, he argued the conspiracy conviction was void because the information never charged it.
Two Ways to Get Notice
The Superior Court treated the question as one of subject matter jurisdiction, reviewed it de novo, and rejected it on two grounds.
The first is that the trial court’s oral order at the 2022 plea hearing cured the information. The court reasoned that once the charge was added and then reinstated along with everything else after the plea was withdrawn, Blackston necessarily had notice that the Commonwealth intended to try him for conspiracy. The court cited Commonwealth v. Nischan, 928 A.2d 349, 356 (Pa. Super. 2007), for the general proposition that an information satisfies the notice requirement.
The second ground is broader. Even if the oral amendment accomplished nothing, the court held that Blackston was “otherwise well aware” of the charge because he accepted a plea agreement that included it, pleaded guilty to it at the colloquy, and pleaded not guilty to it at arraignment without objecting. That reasoning comes from Jones, where the Supreme Court found adequate notice of an uncharged conspiracy count because the defendant had negotiated a plea bargain that included it and the plea colloquy recited the facts, the charges, and the sentences. The Superior Court’s footnote 3 acknowledges that Jones also held the defendant there had waived any complaint about the information by pleading guilty and never specifically raising it.
Two features of the record go unresolved in the opinion. The trial court’s Rule 1925 opinion stated that the docket and bills of information did charge conspiracy to commit first-degree murder from the start; the Superior Court did not adopt that account and instead affirmed on the premise that the information omitted the charge. And the charge the trial court added orally in 2022 was conspiracy to commit third-degree murder, while the charge Blackston was convicted of was conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. The opinion treats the reinstatement order as restoring the higher grade without separately addressing that difference. Rule of Criminal Procedure 564, which governs amendment of an information, is not cited.