Articles

Fairlie & Lippy, P.C. has won another appeal for one of its clients. In Commonwealth v. Ali, 2015 PA Super. 45, the Pennsylvania Superior Court recognized that the trial court had made three significant errors, and that, as a matter of law, Ali must be afforded the opportunity for a new sentencing. It should be noted that […]

In Commonwealth v. Giulian, 2015 WL 751570, the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed a decision by the trial court denying Giulian’s petition for expungement, reading the relevant statute as forbidding expungement where there is a second conviction occurring within a five-year period of the conviction sought to be expunged. An Expungement is a motion that is filed with […]

In Commonwealth v. Stotelmyer, 2015 WL 668038, a three-member controlling plurality of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that imposition of a county intermediate sentence is impermissible where the underlying drug crime conviction carries a mandatory minimum.  At the outset, this case seems difficult to reconcile with existing Pennsylvania court cases addressing the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Alleyne […]

This morning, newly-elected Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf temporarily suspended the imposition of the death penalty in the Commonwealth.  This moratorium on executions applies to 186 currently pending death penalty verdicts, as well as any future convictions.  His decision was prompted by the scheduled execution of Terrance Williams, 48, who has been on death row since being […]

In Commonwealth v. O’Neil, 2015 Pa. Super. Lexis 18, a Pennsylvania Superior Court panel held that it was a manifest abuse of discretion for the trial court to deny a defendant’s request for severance from the capital murder trial of her co-defendant, the infamous Dr. Kermit Gosnell, where the bulk of the evidence pertaining to […]