A defendant stands in a Lancaster County courtroom at the call of the criminal list and hears the judge say his case will be tried during the two-week term that begins October 9. October 9 turns out to be Columbus Day, and the courthouse is closed. Nobody ever tells him personally that his trial will actually start on October 12. He doesn’t appear. The court tries him anyway, the jury convicts him on every count, and he is sentenced years later to twenty-five to fifty years.
Was that permissible?
In Commonwealth v. Buchanan, 2026 PA Super 200 (Pa. Super. filed Sept. 11, 2026), the Superior Court held that it was. President Judge Emeritus Ford Elliott, writing for a panel that included Judge Kunselman and Judge Lane, affirmed the convictions and then did something the defendant never asked for: the court vacated part of the sentence on its own initiative because the minimum term exceeded half the maximum.
The Right to Be Present, and How It Gets Lost
A defendant’s right to be at his own trial is about as basic as rights get. It comes from the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation guarantee and from due process, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has described it as absolute. But absolute does not mean permanent. As the Court explained in Commonwealth v. Sullens, 619 A.2d 1349 (Pa. 1992), the right can be waived expressly, and it can also be waived by conduct.
Pennsylvania Rule of Criminal Procedure 602(A) is where that principle lives in practice. The rule says a defendant’s absence “without cause” at the start of trial, or during it, does not prevent the case from going forward, including the return of the verdict and the imposition of sentence. The comment to the rule adds two things. First, presence may be deemed waived when a defendant intentionally fails to appear after proper notice. Second, the burden of proving that the absence was without cause belongs to the Commonwealth, by a preponderance of the evidence.
That burden is the heart of most trial in absentia appeals, and it is what the appellant in Buchanan built his case around.
One more piece of background matters here, because it decided how much deference the panel gave the trial judge. A decision to proceed in absentia is reviewed for abuse of discretion. Commonwealth v. Wilson, 712 A.2d 735 (Pa. 1998); Commonwealth v. DeCosta, 197 A.3d 813 (Pa. Super. 2018). The appellant argued for review from scratch, with no deference, relying on Commonwealth v. Tejada, 161 A.3d 313 (Pa. Super. 2017). The panel rejected that in a footnote. The defendant in Tejada had been presumptively barred from his retrial because he attacked his lawyer, and his claim was that excluding him without a waiver colloquy violated due process. Colloquy claims get fresh review. A Rule 602 finding that a defendant failed to appear without cause does not.
The Sting, the Plea Offer, and the Empty Chair
The charges came out of an August 2022 undercover operation by the Lancaster County Human Trafficking Task Force. A task force member placed an advertisement on a website used to buy and sell sexual contact, worded to suggest an underage girl. Bradley Buchanan texted the number listed in the ad. The detective on the other end told him she was representing her twelve-year-old niece. They agreed on a price and a half-hour session.
Buchanan drove about fifty minutes and pulled into the parking lot of a nearby Comfort Inn. He texted, “I just need to see her before I come up.” Officers arrested him in his car with the agreed amount of cash in his pocket. A warranted search of his phone turned up the full conversation, applications that concealed his identity and number, and more than a hundred searches of the website the task force had used.
At the call of the list on September 29, 2023, his lawyer initially suggested scheduling a guilty plea hearing. When the judge offered to take the plea that morning, counsel asked to have Buchanan brought in. The court told him directly that a conviction on the second-strike sexual offense carried a mandatory minimum of twenty-five years under 42 Pa.C.S. § 9718.2, and that the Commonwealth’s offer of half that would expire at the end of the day. Buchanan said no. In his presence, the court placed the case on the trial list for the week of October 9.
Under Lancaster County practice at the time, the specific date came later. After the call of the list, the District Attorney’s Office assembled a priority list for each judge’s two-week term and then told defense counsel which day the case would be reached. Defense counsel was responsible for passing the date to the client.
Counsel sent Buchanan what he described on the record as “red alert” emails, and expected that Buchanan would turn up at the closed courthouse on October 9 and call him. Neither happened. On October 12, counsel asked for a continuance because he could not reach his client. The Commonwealth objected: one detective would be unavailable the following week, and another had postponed a major medical procedure to testify. The court denied the continuance and tried the case without him. The jury convicted on all counts.
Buchanan was located in Santa Cruz, California in February 2025 and brought back for sentencing. There, speaking for himself, he said: “when I absconded, it wasn’t — I wasn’t trying to disrespect the Court.” He explained that his father was dying and he wanted time with him.
Notice of the Term Was Notice Enough
The appellant’s argument had a clean shape. The only trial date on the docket was October 9. The courts were closed that day. Nothing showed he was ever told any other date. And the Commonwealth introduced no evidence at all, before the trial started, that his absence was willful. He pointed to Commonwealth v. Pantano, 836 A.2d 948 (Pa. Super. 2003), where the Superior Court reversed a trial held in absentia after the defendant’s lawyer got a message about a death in the family and the Commonwealth did not oppose a continuance. He pointed to DeCosta, where the defendant missed the final day of deliberations because he was sedated and on a ventilator with sepsis, and the trial court’s contrary finding was called manifestly unreasonable.
The panel distinguished both cases on the same ground. In each, the defendant offered an explanation for his absence and the Commonwealth did not oppose a continuance. Buchanan offered nothing, because he was not in contact with anyone.
On the notice question, the panel accepted the trial court’s account of how Lancaster County ran its trial list and held that notice of the two-week term satisfied the requirement. Buchanan was present when the case was listed and was told that October 9 began the next trial term. It followed, the court reasoned, that his trial would be held somewhere in the two weeks beginning that day, and that counsel would learn the exact date from the District Attorney’s Office. What was required of him was to stay ready and to stay in touch with his lawyer.
He did neither, and that failure carried the rest of the analysis. Quoting Wilson, the panel repeated that a defendant owes the court an affirmative duty to say whether he will be absent, personally or through counsel. It then invoked Commonwealth v. Kelly, 78 A.3d 1136 (Pa. Super. 2013): by voluntarily refusing to remain in contact with counsel, a presumption arises that the defendant knowingly sought to avoid being tried. Several non-precedential decisions were collected alongside Kelly for the same point.
The court also noted in a footnote what may be the most portable sentence in the opinion: where a defendant has due notice of the trial date and willfully fails to appear, that alone is enough to support the exercise of discretion to proceed without him, citing Commonwealth v. Johnson, 734 A.2d 864 (Pa. Super. 1999).
The Objection That Came Too Late, and the Admission That Came Too Early
The appellant’s strongest point was about proof. Rule 602’s comment puts the burden on the Commonwealth, and here the Commonwealth put on no evidence of willfulness before the trial began. The panel gave two answers.
The first was preservation. Buchanan never objected to the absence of evidence at the time. He raised it for the first time in a supplemental post-sentence motion, filed almost two years after the trial. Citing Commonwealth v. Strunk, 953 A.2d 577 (Pa. Super. 2008), and the en banc decision in Commonwealth v. Rosser, 135 A.3d 1077 (Pa. Super. 2016), the court held that a party must object at the earliest possible stage so the judge can fix the problem then. Waiting, the panel said, improperly imposes an obligation on the Commonwealth after the fact to produce evidence nobody asked for when it could have been produced.
The second answer was his own statement at sentencing. He had said he absconded. The appellant argued that an admission made in May 2025 could not retroactively justify a ruling made in October 2023, and that it did not relieve the Commonwealth of a burden it never carried. The panel’s response was that he gave no reason why the Commonwealth should be made to prove a fact he did not contest when he could have and can no longer dispute now. In a footnote, the court addressed his alternative reading of the admission, which was that he never conceded knowing the trial date, by treating that as a separate question already resolved against him on the notice record.
What This Means for a Client Who Goes Missing
For defense lawyers, the practical lesson sits in the county practice that produced this record. Where a court lists cases by trial term and leaves it to counsel to relay the specific date, the client’s notice of the term is treated as notice of the trial, and the duty to learn the date shifts onto him through his lawyer. Document the communications. Counsel’s statement on the record that he sent repeated emails and could not reach his client became part of the evidence supporting the finding of willful absence. If a client has a real reason for not appearing, get it to the court through counsel before trial starts. That single fact is what separates Pantano and DeCosta from this case. And if the Commonwealth has not put on evidence of willfulness, say so on the record, because Buchanan holds that raising it in a post-sentence motion is too late.
For a defendant, the shorter version is this. Rejecting a plea offer and then leaving does not pause the case. The trial goes forward, the jury hears only the Commonwealth’s evidence, and the sentence gets imposed whenever you are found. What Buchanan said at sentencing to explain himself was then used on appeal as proof that his absence had been a choice.