Articles

A three-member panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court held in Commonwealth v. Bizzel, 2014 WL 6756277, that 18 Pa.C.S. § 6317, the drug-free school zone statute, is unconstitutional under United States v. Alleyne, 133 S.Ct. 2151 (2013).  The decision is currently under appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Section 6317 of the Crimes Code requires additional, mandatory […]

In a plurality opinion, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided in Commonwealth v. Molina, 2014 WL 6477607, that the use of pre-arrest silence as substantive evidence of guilt violates a non-testifying defendant’s constitutional rights.   This holding is based on the Pennsylvania Constitution, Article 9, the Declaration of Rights, and therefore will not be affected should the […]

Steven Fairlie has been selected by the Advisory Board of the Litigation Counsel of America to become a Fellow in the society. The LCA is a trial lawyer honorary society that limits membership to less than one-half of one percent of all North American judges, lawyers and scholars. Fellowship is highly selective and can only […]

Forfeiture is again in the news (see our previous posts here and here) as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled last week that a person’s home/and or other property  connected to the commission of a crime may be legally taken by the state through summary judgment, that is, without any requirement of a jury trial. Gregory Palazzari owned […]

In Commonwealth v. Descardes, 2014 WL 4696243, an en banc panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court considered whether it was error to treat a resident alien’s coram nobis petition as a PCRA petition and held that the peculiar circumstances giving rise to this case merited treatment as one of the rare instances where a claim falls outside […]