Last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found that a mandatory life without parole sentence for felony murder is unconstitutional, the Abolitionist Law Center announced.
The Court’s ruling in Commonwealth v. Derek Lee found that mandatory life without parole for all felony murder convictions, without considering culpability, violates the state’s protection against cruel punishments. The ruling noted this imposes the harshest penalty—imprisonment until death—no matter the offender’s actual culpability.
According to the Abolitionist Law Center, the state’s felony murder law is “particularly extreme because the only possible sentence is life without parole.”
Pennsylvania has sentenced more than 1,000 people to life without parole for felony murder, 70% of whom are Black, according to the law center. Pennsylvania has one of the highest rates of LWOP sentences, “with Philadelphia having sentenced more people to die in prison than any local jurisdiction on the planet,” the Abolitionist Law Center noted.