Articles

The Superior Court of Pennsylvania has ruled in Commonwealth v. Stradley (2012) that in a DUI accident case, the drunk driver must reimburse the insurance company if the company paid the victim restitution. In Stradley, the appellant argued that since the insurance company had already paid for the full amount of the actual loss on […]

Governor Tom Corbett has just signed a death warrant to execute a man on October 3rd of this year…13 years after the last person was executed in Pennsylvania. Terrance Williams, now 46, is set to be executed for murdering Amos Norwood in 1984 when Williams was just 18 years old. Williams has appealed three times […]

Pennsylvania prison statistics: Number of state prisoners: 51,757 Number of county jail inmates: ~36,000 Number of penitentiaries: 26 Overpopulation in state penitentiaries: 4,000+ inmates Recidivism rate: 44% Annual corrections budget: $1.86 billion Price of new correctional complex at Graterford: $315 million Historically, Pennsylvania has maintained a “lock them up and throw away the key” prison […]

Thanks to some recent Court decisions, certain immigrants who are facing deportation now have a good chance at remaining in the United States. In Lafler v. Cooper, 556 U.S. –––– (2012) and Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S.Ct. 1473 (2010), the Supreme Court ruled that if a defendant’s attorney fails to accurately advise him of a […]

Although not yet adopted in Pennsylvania, the New Jersey Supreme Court today released amended jury instructions based on the Court’s ruling last year in State v. Henderson, where the Court examined a plethora of research relating to the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The goal of the new instructions is to inform jurors that eyewitness testimony […]