Articles

In Commonwealth v. Dunnavant, 2014 Pa. LEXIS 3457, a 3-3 tie (due to the resignation of former Justice McCaffery) resulted in the per curiam affirmance of the Superior Court’s opinion that a videotape recorded by a confidential informant wearing a covert digital camera during a staged drug-buy within the defendant’s home must be suppressed as […]

In a split decision, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Commonwealth v. Koch, 2014 Pa. LEXIS 3491, affirmed the lower court’s decision that text messages discovered during a drug investigation were inadmissible hearsay. Believe it or not, in 2015, Pennsylvania (like many other states) still does not have a coherent legal rule for the authentication and […]

Just before Christmas, a Superior Court panel consisting of Judges Wecht, Panella, and Ott released a new opinion, Commonwealth v. Perel, 2014 WL 7331025,  exploring the confines of the 4th Amendment and Pennsylvania’s counterpart in Article 1, § 9 of the Commonwealth’s Constitution.   Judge Wecht wrote the majority opinion in the 2-1 decision. Judge Ott dissented. […]

In Commonwealth v. Wolfe, 2014 PA Super. 288, the Pennsylvania Superior Court continued to deal with the consequences of Alleyne v. United States, 133 S.Ct. 2151 (2013), as it struck down the ten-year mandatory minimum pursuant  to section 9718(a)(1) for crimes against minors.  The statutory text of section 9718 is written in the same format as those […]

In Commonwealth v. Garibay, 758 WDA 2012,  the Pennsylvania Superior Court, sitting en banc, held that the Commonwealth must produce, by testimony or actual documentation, statistics, data or reports to support the choice of location, timing, and duration of a vehicle-stop checkpoint in order to meet the “reasonableness” standard required for seizures under the Pennsylvania and United […]