On May 20, 2026, the Superior Court handed down three precedential decisions in criminal cases. They don’t share a common theme — one is about probation revocation, one is about when the Commonwealth can take an appeal, and one is about what counts as a “crime” for purposes of burglary. But they came down together, and each is worth a few minutes for anyone practicing criminal law in Pennsylvania. I’ll take them in order of how much they actually change, starting with the one that adds another chapter to a story I’ve been following all year.
Commonwealth v. Hoege: Act 44 Reaches Back Even Further
Back in March, I wrote about how the Superior Court had been rewriting Pennsylvania probation law in real time — a run of 2026 decisions interpreting Act 44 of 2023, the statute that capped how much incarceration a court can impose for a technical probation violation. The short version, for anyone who hasn’t followed along: a first technical violation now carries a maximum of fourteen days; a second, thirty; and only on a third or subsequent violation can a court reach back into the original sentencing range. Commonwealth v. Seals, the en banc anchor of that line, held that a violation of those caps goes to the legality of the sentence — meaning it can never be waived and can be corrected at any time — and that the caps apply retroactively.
Commonwealth v. Hoege, 2026 PA Super 105, is the next chapter.
How Hoege Got Here
Kassey Hoege was convicted in 2005 of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and related offenses and sentenced to a long prison term followed by five years of probation. In November 2022, having finished the incarceration portion, his parole agent removed his ankle monitor and — mistakenly — told him he had completed his sentence and was free to move to Wisconsin. The agent caught the error the next day and told Hoege to come back to Pennsylvania to transfer his supervision properly. Hoege said he would. He didn’t.
A bench warrant issued, he was picked up in Wisconsin in October 2023, and the court revoked his probation and resentenced him to two and a half to five years in prison. That was November 2023 — roughly six months before Act 44’s caps took effect on June 11, 2024.
The procedural history that follows is a small tutorial in how a meritorious issue can survive a tangle of missed deadlines. Hoege’s post-sentence motion didn’t toll the appeal period, his judgment became final when no timely appeal followed, and his first appeal was quashed as untimely. He got his appeal rights restored through a PCRA petition — the collateral process for challenging a conviction or sentence — on the ground that his revocation counsel had been ineffective for failing to file a timely appeal. So he finally arrived in the Superior Court after much delay.
The Claim He Raised — and the One the Court Decided
Hoege didn’t argue that Act 44 applied to him. His brief was written before Seals came down, and he framed his appeal as a discretionary-aspects challenge: the court abused its discretion by imposing the statutory maximum for a technical violation just weeks before the Legislature would have capped that same violation at fourteen days. A “gross sentencing discrepancy,” he called it, at a moment when everyone could see the reform coming.
The Superior Court found that claim waived. He had challenged his sentence below, but not on that theory, and a discretionary-aspects claim has to be preserved. Under the old version of Section 9771, that was the end of the line.
But the court didn’t stop. Because Seals had since reclassified Act 44 caps as legality-of-sentence questions, and because an illegal sentence can be corrected sua sponte — on the court’s own initiative, without anyone asking — the panel reached the issue Hoege hadn’t raised. And on that issue, he won.
Why the Section 5 Argument Matters
Act 44’s caps took effect June 11, 2024. Hoege was resentenced in November 2023. So why does the new statute govern a sentence imposed before it existed? The answer is in the uncodified text of the act itself. Section 5 of Act 44 says the act applies to individuals “sentenced or resentenced” on or after the effective date — and then, in a second paragraph, says that except for one provision not relevant here, the act also applies to individuals “sentenced or resentenced” prior to the effective date.
That second paragraph is the whole game. Pennsylvania’s default rule is that amendments apply only prospectively unless the Legislature clearly says otherwise. Here, the Legislature clearly said otherwise. The court read Section 5 for exactly what it says and applied the amended statute to Hoege.
What’s notable is the route. The Seals court had reached the same retroactivity conclusion, but it did so in what Hoege candidly labels dicta — reasoning not essential to the decision, and therefore not binding. Hoege instead grounds the holding directly in the statutory text of Section 5, citing Seals and Commonwealth v. Morton as agreeing colleagues rather than as controlling authority. The panel even flags a citation trap worth knowing about: the official codification of Section 9771 cross-references Section 5’s applicability provisions, but the annotated Purdon’s reprint omits any reference to Section 5. The court relied on the language of the amendatory act, not either codification. If you’re litigating one of these cases, pull the act itself — not just the codified statute.
The court paused to confirm there’s no ex post facto problem, and there isn’t. An ex post facto law is one that reaches back in time to disadvantage a defendant — punishing conduct that wasn’t criminal when committed, or increasing the penalty after the fact. Act 44 does the opposite. It shrinks the available punishment. Applying it retroactively helps Hoege, so the constitutional bar doesn’t come into play.
The result: two and one-half to five years for a first technical violation is an illegal sentence under amended Section 9771, which caps that violation at fourteen days. Vacated and remanded.
Commonwealth v. Broomes: The Commonwealth Can Appeal Its Lost Evidence, Not Yours
The second decision is one for appellate practitioners, and it turns on a point that’s easy to get wrong because it feels backward at first.
We start with a baseline most people know: the prosecution generally can’t appeal in a criminal case. The double jeopardy clause means the government gets one shot, and it doesn’t get to keep appealing adverse rulings the way a civil litigant might. The Commonwealth can appeal only where a statute or rule expressly says it can.
One of those rules is Pennsylvania Rule of Appellate Procedure 311(d). It lets the Commonwealth take an immediate appeal — before trial, from an order that doesn’t end the case — when it certifies that the order “will terminate or substantially handicap the prosecution.” The classic example is an order suppressing the Commonwealth’s evidence. Lose a suppression motion, and the prosecutor may genuinely have no case left; Rule 311(d) lets the Commonwealth test that ruling on appeal before jeopardy attaches.
What Happened in Broomes
Commonwealth v. Broomes, 2026 PA Super 103, arose from an attempted-homicide prosecution. The Commonwealth alleged that Errol Broomes struck the victim in the head with a rock and drove his car, with her inside, over an embankment. The victim was the central witness.
The defense theory was that the victim had fabricated part of her account to cover up stealing from Broomes — and the defense wanted to cross-examine her about a prior arrest for theft and identity theft involving withdrawals from Broomes’s bank and credit accounts. Those charges had been withdrawn before her preliminary hearing, on a former prosecutor’s determination that the police investigation was thin.
The Commonwealth moved in limine to keep that cross-examination out, arguing a bare arrest isn’t proper impeachment and that letting the jury hear about it would gut the credibility of its only eyewitness. The trial court denied the motion. The Commonwealth certified under Rule 311(d) that the ruling would substantially handicap its prosecution and appealed.
Why the Appeal Was Quashed
The Superior Court never reached whether the cross-examination should come in. It quashed the appeal because the Commonwealth had no right to bring it.
Rule 311(d) lets the Commonwealth appeal an order that suppresses, precludes, or excludes the Commonwealth’s evidence. It does not let the Commonwealth appeal an order that admits the defendant’s evidence. The order Broomes challenged was the second kind — it let the defense use its cross-examination material. That the Commonwealth genuinely believed the ruling would cripple its case didn’t change the analysis. The character of the order, not the size of the handicap, controls.
The court walked through how this rule settled into place — Cosnek, Shearer, White, and the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Pownall — and the through-line is consistent. The Commonwealth’s certification of handicap is taken in good faith and isn’t itself contestable. But certification only gets you in the door if the order is the type the rule covers. There’s a structural reason for the limit, drawn straight from Cosnek: if the Commonwealth could appeal every ruling admitting defense evidence, a defendant would have to choose between a speedy trial and his right to put on a defense, and the prosecution would gain an “unwarranted and unfettered influence over the defense case.” The rule keeps that from happening.
So the distinction isn’t a technicality. Suppress the Commonwealth’s evidence, and the prosecution may appeal. Let in the defendant’s evidence, and it may not — even if the practical effect on the case is identical. The remedy for an evidentiary ruling the Commonwealth doesn’t like is the same one available to every other litigant: object at trial, develop the record, and raise it later if there’s a conviction to defend. There just isn’t a pretrial appeal in that direction.
For the defense bar, Broomes is a useful card to hold. When the Commonwealth tries to take an interlocutory appeal from an order that lets in your evidence, the response is a motion to quash. The certification doesn’t save it.
Commonwealth v. Bryant: Yes, Violating a PFA Order Can Be the “Crime” in a Burglary
The last case is the most straightforward of the three, because the Supreme Court answered the question almost thirty years ago.
Commonwealth v. Bryant, 2026 PA Super 104, was a burglary appeal. To prove burglary, the Commonwealth has to show that the defendant entered a building intending to commit a crime inside. Khalil Bryant repeatedly broke into the apartment of a woman who had an active protection-from-abuse order against him — once in the middle of the night while she slept — and kept contacting her, from jail, through letters and an unknown cell phone, trying to coerce her into dropping the charges.
Bryant’s argument on appeal was a clever one: contempt of a PFA order, he said, isn’t technically a “crime” under Section 106 of the Crimes Code, because the PFA Act sits in Title 23 and assigns no offense gradation. If violating the PFA wasn’t a crime, then he didn’t enter the apartment intending to commit one, and the burglary conviction fails.
The problem is that the Supreme Court foreclosed this in Commonwealth v. Majeed, 694 A.2d 336 (Pa. 1997), which held that a defendant’s intent to violate an active PFA order satisfies the intent element of burglary. A PFA violation, Majeed explained, “is a violation of the law, a public wrong, punishable by a fine, imprisonment, or both,” and treating it as enough to support burglary advances the PFA Act’s purpose of preventing domestic violence and unauthorized invasions of the home. The Superior Court was bound by that holding, applied it, and affirmed.
And even if Majeed hadn’t settled it, Bryant would still lose. The Commonwealth doesn’t have to prove which crime a burglar intended; under Commonwealth v. Alston, a factfinder can infer criminal intent from the totality of the circumstances. Bryant’s repeated nighttime entries supported an inference of intent to harass and stalk — independent crimes that could carry the burglary intent element on their own. The PFA-contempt theory was never the only road to conviction, which is part of why the result here was never in doubt.
There’s not much daylight in Bryant. It’s a clean application of controlling precedent to facts that didn’t test its edges.