The Pennsylvania Supreme Court handed down three significant criminal law decisions on March 26, 2026. The most important — by a wide margin — is Commonwealth v. Derek Lee, a ruling that upends Pennsylvania’s mandatory sentencing scheme for felony murder. The other two, Commonwealth v. Belgrave and Commonwealth v. Arnett, are more focused. Here’s what happened in each.
Commonwealth v. Lee: Life Without Parole for Felony Murder Is Now Unconstitutional in Pennsylvania
The Question at the Heart of the Case
Can Pennsylvania sentence someone to life in prison without any chance of parole — automatically, with no consideration of that person’s individual role or culpability — simply because someone died during a robbery they were part of? On March 26, 2026, a majority of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court answered that question: no, it cannot. Not under the Pennsylvania Constitution.
What Felony Murder Is — and Why It’s Controversial
To understand Lee, you need to understand the felony-murder rule. Under Pennsylvania law, felony murder — called “second-degree murder” in our Crimes Code — occurs when a person is killed during the commission of certain dangerous felonies: robbery, rape, burglary, arson, and kidnapping, among others. Crucially, the defendant doesn’t need to have killed anyone, or even intended for anyone to die. The required mental state — what lawyers call “malice” — is legally borrowed from the intent to commit the underlying felony. The shooter and the getaway driver are equally guilty of murder.
Pennsylvania law then mandated that everyone convicted of second-degree murder receive the same sentence: life in prison without the possibility of parole. No exceptions. No judicial discretion. No consideration of whether the defendant fired a gun or merely drove the car.
The felony murder rule has ancient and somewhat murky origins. Many trace it to a 1797 passage by Sir Edward Coke, though scholars argue Coke overstated what earlier English law actually required. England, the rule’s birthplace, abolished felony murder entirely in 1957. In America, the rule has been narrowed in most states — some limit it to particularly dangerous felonies, some apply it only to the actual killer. Pennsylvania was one of only a handful of states that still mandated life without parole for every felony murder conviction, regardless of the defendant’s role.
Derek Lee’s Case
On October 14, 2014, Derek Lee and Paul Durham entered the Pittsburgh home of Leonard Butler and Tina Chapple. Both men were armed. They forced the couple into the basement at gunpoint, demanding money. Lee pistol-whipped Butler, stole his watch, and went back upstairs. Durham stayed in the basement. Butler struggled with Durham over the gun. It fired, and Butler was killed.
Lee was the co-defendant, not the shooter. The jury acquitted him of first-degree murder — the charge that requires proof of specific intent to kill — but convicted him of second-degree murder, robbery, and conspiracy. Under Pennsylvania law, the conviction automatically meant life without parole. No sentencing hearing to evaluate his role. No weighing of his culpability against Durham’s. Just a mandatory sentence.
Lee challenged his sentence, arguing it violated both the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 13 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which prohibits “cruel punishments.”
The Federal Constitutional Claim — and Why It Failed
The Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” Lee pointed to a series of United States Supreme Court decisions — Enmund v. Florida (1982), Graham v. Florida (2010), and Miller v. Alabama (2012) — arguing that the same logic used to limit death sentences and juvenile life-without-parole sentences should apply to adult non-killers convicted of felony murder.
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania rejected this argument. The federal decisions relied on by Lee involved either the death penalty or juvenile offenders — categories the United States Supreme Court has treated as constitutionally distinct. The high Court has never extended those protections to adults convicted of murder, regardless of their role. Without a signal from the United States Supreme Court that it’s ready to take that step, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court declined to get there first under the federal Constitution.
That could have been the end of the case. But it wasn’t.
The Pennsylvania Constitutional Claim — and Why It Succeeded
Here’s where Lee becomes genuinely landmark. Rather than stopping at the Eighth Amendment, the Court turned to Article I, Section 13 of our own Constitution, which says simply that “cruel punishments” shall not be inflicted. No “and unusual” qualifier. Just cruel.
That textual difference turns out to matter quite a lot.
The Court conducted a full four-factor analysis under Commonwealth v. Edmunds (1991) — the framework Pennsylvania courts use when deciding whether the state constitution provides greater protections than its federal counterpart. Those four factors are the constitutional text, the history of the provision, related case law from other states, and policy considerations.
On the text: The Eighth Amendment requires a punishment to be both cruel and unusual. “Unusual” has an independent meaning — it refers to punishments that have “long fallen out of use.” If a punishment is still widely practiced, it can’t be “unusual” in the constitutional sense, no matter how harsh it may be. Pennsylvania’s Constitution contains no such limitation. It bars all cruel punishments, period. That omission, the Court held, is meaningful. A broader prohibition on cruelty, untethered from the practice-history requirement embedded in “unusual,” provides wider protection.
On the history: This is the richest part of the opinion, and the part most likely to endure. Pennsylvania, the Court explained, has a distinct constitutional tradition around punishment — one rooted not in English common law but in Enlightenment philosophy. Pennsylvania’s constitutional framers, influenced by Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria, believed that punishment was only justified by deterrence and rehabilitation. Anything beyond what was necessary for those purposes was, by their lights, cruel. This tradition shaped the 1790 Pennsylvania Constitution — ratified before the Eighth Amendment — and deliberately omitted the word “unusual.” The framers weren’t bystanders to the federal drafting process; they were the predecessors who chose a different path. The Court relied heavily on recent scholarship by Kevin Bendesky, whose 2023 article traced the original meaning of Section 13 to this Enlightenment foundation.
On other states: The Court surveyed states with similar “cruel punishments” clauses — no “unusual” qualifier — and found that those which have conducted rigorous independent analyses (Washington, South Dakota, and Michigan, among others) have generally found broader protection than the Eighth Amendment provides.
On policy: The Court was careful here, acknowledging that general policy concerns — racial disparities, cost of incarceration, international comparisons — are matters for the legislature, not the judiciary. It gave these considerations limited weight to avoid the appearance of policy-making from the bench.
Putting the four factors together, the Court concluded that Section 13 provides greater protections than the Eighth Amendment and that, under Section 13, a sentencing scheme imposing mandatory life without parole on all felony murder defendants — regardless of whether they killed, intended to kill, or had any role in the killing — is unconstitutionally cruel.
The core problem is culpability. Second-degree murder sweeps together vastly different conduct: the triggerman and the lookout are legally identical. The penalty — life without parole, the second-harshest sentence allowed by law — takes none of that variation into account. Under the Pennsylvania Constitution, the Court held, a mandatory sentence of that severity cannot be imposed without any individualized assessment of the offender’s actual role and moral culpability.
What the Court Did and Did Not Hold
The majority was careful to cabin its holding. It did not declare the felony-murder rule unconstitutional — that rule, and its theory of imputed malice, remains valid law. It did not disturb life-without-parole sentences for first-degree murder, which involves a complex individualized sentencing process. It held only that a mandatory sentencing scheme imposing life without parole on all second-degree murder defendants — automatically, without any individualized consideration — crosses the constitutional line.
The Court vacated Lee’s sentence and remanded for resentencing. On remand, the sentencing court must consider Lee’s individual culpability and may impose either life without parole (if the facts warrant it) or a sentence of life imprisonment with a minimum term that makes Lee eligible for parole consideration.
Recognizing the enormous practical implications of its ruling — there are thousands of individuals in Pennsylvania serving these sentences — the Court stayed its mandate for 120 days to give the General Assembly time to consider remedial legislation.
The Concurring Opinions
Five justices joined the majority opinion. Three wrote separately to emphasize specific points, and the fifth — Justice Brobson — concurred in the outcome but dissented from key aspects of the analysis.
Justice Dougherty (joined by Justice McCaffery) wrote to address the textual argument in more depth and to note a second, independent basis for rejecting the Eighth Amendment claim: the punishment, while perhaps cruel, is not “unusual” in the constitutional sense, because mandatory felony murder sentences remain common across the United States. He also stressed what the word “cruel” cannot mean — it doesn’t simply mean painful (all punishment is painful), and it doesn’t mean the same thing as “excessive.” A sentence is constitutionally cruel only when it rises to the level of undue harshness that shocks the conscience — which, he agreed, is what the mandatory felony murder scheme does.
Justice Wecht wrote to address what he called the broader methodological lesson of the case: Pennsylvania courts should stop reading the state constitution in lockstep with the Eighth Amendment. The Pennsylvania Constitution predates the Eighth Amendment; it has its own text, its own history, and its own logic. When courts simply assume that the two documents mean the same thing, they abandon their obligation to interpret Pennsylvania’s own organic law. He also addressed the penological discussion in the majority, emphasizing that retribution remains a legitimate sentencing consideration and that today’s decision does not invite courts to invalidate ordinary sentences based on some assessment of whether they exceed what is “necessary” for deterrence or rehabilitation. And he wrote separately to note, pointedly, that foreign law has no role in interpreting the Pennsylvania Constitution — a subtle rebuke of advocacy tactics that have become increasingly common in Eighth Amendment litigation.
Justice Mundy wrote to stress the limited scope of the holding. In her view, the case was decided on the specific question of whether a mandatory life-without-parole sentence is constitutional as applied to defendants who did not kill, intend to kill, or attempt to kill. That is the issue the Court accepted for review, and that is all it decided. She cautioned against reading the majority’s language as invalidating life-without-parole sentences for all second-degree murderers — including those who did kill or intended to kill. That question, she emphasized, is not before the Court, and the legislature retains broad authority to set sentences for those defendants. She also pushed back on the majority’s deterrence analysis, arguing that harsher penalties generally deter more conduct, not less.
Justice Brobson agreed with the constitutional conclusion but dissented from the remedy. His concern is practical: the majority directed resentencing based on “individual culpability” but provided no framework for what that means. In the juvenile context after Miller v. Alabama, Pennsylvania courts had the benefit of both the Supreme Court’s guidance and a detailed legislative response — Section 1102.1 of the Crimes Code — that spelled out the factors a sentencing court must consider. Here, there is no such framework. Brobson argued that sending this back for resentencing without clear guidance invites wildly inconsistent outcomes. He would have stayed the matter pending legislative action rather than remanding immediately.
Commonwealth v. Belgrave: The Fifth Amendment Doesn’t Need to Be Invoked Out Loud
Commonwealth v. Belgrave is a prosecutorial misconduct case with a straightforward core but a wrinkle that created a split between the trial court, the Superior Court, and the Supreme Court.
Jermaine Belgrave was tried in Erie County for drug offenses arising from a February 2019 drug deal gone wrong. The prosecution’s key would-be witness was Charles Baizar, Belgrave’s alleged co-conspirator, who had already pleaded guilty to conspiracy. The problem: Baizar filed a motion the day before trial announcing that he intended to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and would not testify. Despite this, the prosecutor called Baizar to the stand anyway — after securing an immunity grant that technically voided Baizar’s Fifth Amendment privilege.
What followed was exactly what Belgrave’s counsel had predicted. In opening statements, the prosecutor told the jury that Baizar “knows exactly what happened,” that he “does not want to be there,” and that he would “attempt to hide” the truth. When Baizar actually took the stand, he refused to answer virtually every question. The prosecutor then asked a series of leading questions to a stone-silent witness — essentially testifying himself through the vehicle of unanswered questions, planting the suggestion that Baizar had admitted to police that he came to Erie to sell heroin with Belgrave. In closing, the prosecutor emphasized Baizar’s silence, telling the jury that Baizar “refused to say” that Belgrave was not involved.
The legal framework the Court applied comes from two 1973 decisions: Commonwealth v. Terenda and Commonwealth v. DuVal. Both cases hold that it is prosecutorial misconduct — and reversible error — for a prosecutor to call a witness to the stand with foreknowledge that the witness intends to refuse to answer questions. The purpose of the rule is to prevent the jury from drawing an improper adverse inference from the witness’s silence, treating that silence as a tacit confession of the defendant’s guilt.
The Superior Court had distinguished those cases on a narrow ground: in Terenda and DuVal, the witnesses explicitly invoked the Fifth Amendment in front of the jury. Here, Baizar just refused to answer. He never said “Fifth Amendment.” The Superior Court found that distinction meaningful, relying on a third case, Commonwealth v. Todaro, which had found no error when a co-conspirator invoked the Fifth quietly, outside the jury’s hearing, before being excused from the stand entirely.
The Supreme Court rejected this as a distinction without a difference. The harm of the DuVal rule isn’t limited to what happens after the witness takes the stand — it’s the decision to call the witness at all when the prosecutor knows the witness will stand silent. Whether Baizar said “Fifth Amendment” or just said nothing, the jury was left with a parade of unanswered accusatory questions. The inference available to any reasonable juror — that the questions described real events Baizar didn’t want to acknowledge — was no less powerful because Baizar remained quiet rather than invoking a constitutional privilege by name.
The Court reversed Belgrave’s conviction and remanded, declining to find the error harmless. In a case where the prosecutor made herculean efforts to get Baizar’s testimony, opened and closed by emphasizing his anticipated cooperation and ultimate silence, and used the witness stand as a vehicle to smuggle in the substance of an out-of-court statement the jury would never otherwise have heard, it was impossible to say the conduct didn’t affect the verdict.
The decision makes explicit what was arguably already implicit in the prior case law: DuVal applies whenever a prosecutor calls a witness the prosecutor knows will refuse to answer questions, regardless of whether the witness’s silence is accompanied by an invocation of the Fifth Amendment.
Commonwealth v. Arnett: PCRA Is the Wrong Vehicle to Challenge SORNA
Commonwealth v. Arnett resolves a procedural question that has been floating unanswered in Pennsylvania’s courts for years: can a registered sex offender use the Post Conviction Relief Act — the PCRA — to challenge the constitutionality of SORNA, Pennsylvania’s sex offender registration law?
The short answer is no.
Robert Arnett pleaded guilty in 2004 to aggravated indecent assault and related charges arising from sexual conduct with a fourteen-year-old. He was sentenced to five to ten years’ incarceration. After his release, Pennsylvania’s evolving sex offender registration scheme — which has changed dramatically since 2004 — subjected him to lifetime registration requirements under SORNA II. Fifteen years after his sentence became final, Arnett filed a PCRA petition challenging those requirements as unconstitutional under the Pennsylvania Constitution’s protection of the right to reputation.
The Supreme Court held that the PCRA simply doesn’t authorize that kind of challenge. The PCRA exists to challenge a conviction or sentence — it provides relief to people convicted of crimes they didn’t commit or serving illegal sentences. SORNA II is not a criminal sentence. The Court, in Commonwealth v. Lacombe (2020) and Commonwealth v. Torsilieri(2024), had already held that SORNA II is non-punitive in nature. Because it’s not punishment, it’s not a “sentence” for PCRA purposes. A challenge to a non-punitive regulatory scheme simply isn’t cognizable under the statute.
The practical problem this creates is real: SORNA’s timeliness rules effectively bar most offenders from filing a timely PCRA petition to challenge their registration requirements anyway, since their judgment of sentence became final long before SORNA’s current requirements took effect. The Court acknowledged the awkwardness but declined to find a workaround in the statute’s plain language.
Arnett had also styled his petition as a habeas corpus petition, and the Court left that avenue open — declining to decide whether habeas corpus is a viable mechanism to challenge SORNA. The parties largely agreed it should be, and the Court’s restraint on that question is consistent with its position in Lacombe: it won’t prematurely close off procedural avenues in a rapidly evolving area of law without full briefing and argument.
The Court then vacated the lower court’s order on the merits. Even setting aside the procedural problem, the constitutional challenge Arnett raised — that SORNA II rests on an irrebuttable presumption that violates the right to reputation — had been squarely decided against him in Torsilieri II (2024). That decision applied equally to Subchapter I of SORNA II (which governs offenders whose crimes predated December 2012) as to Subchapter H (which governs later offenders). Both subchapters rest on the same legislative presumption that sex offenders pose a high risk of reoffending, and the scientific evidence in Torsilieri II supported rather than undermined that presumption.
Justice Brobson concurred in the conclusion that the PCRA is the wrong vehicle, but wrote separately to argue that the Court should have also resolved whether habeas corpus is available. In his view, the better mechanism — if any exists — would be an original action against the Pennsylvania State Police in Commonwealth Court, since challenges to the SORNA registry are effectively challenges to a state agency’s maintenance of a record. The majority declined to reach that question without fuller adversarial development.