Commonwealth v. Lee

Pa. Const. art. I, § 13 (“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel punishments inflicted.”

Derek Lee was convicted of second degree (“felony”) murder after committing a home invasion robbery. During the robbery, Lee was in another room when, during a struggle between one victim and Lee’s accomplice over a gun, the gun went off and killed the victim. Lee’s conviction did not require showing intent to kill; only his intent to commit the robbery that, ultimately, led to death. Yet Lee was given the mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Lee challenged his sentence as unconstitutionally excessive because he neither killed nor intended to kill, and his individual culpability was never considered.

Mandatory life without parole for people convicted of felony murder, and who neither killed nor intended to kill, is excessive punishment and violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s bar on “cruel” punishment.

First, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court—overturning prior precedent—held that Section 13’s bar on “cruel” punishment provides greater rights than the federal 8th Amendment prohibition on “cruel and unusual” punishment. Here the textual distinction was key, but the court also relied heavily on historical analysis, finding that the Commonwealth’s founders embraced a “distinctly Pennsylvanian” view of punishment based on Enlightenment ideals of punishing only to promote deterrence and reformation.

Next the court turned to the question of whether mandatory LWOP for felony murder is “cruel.” Here, the court adopted the same framework of heightened review that the U.S. Supreme Court has used to set categorical limits on capital punishment and prison terms for youth. While other courts have declined to extend heightened categorical review beyond those specific contexts, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recognized that there is no logical reason to do so. The court explained that its analysis would mirror the “framework” in “Eighth Amendment jurisprudence regarding juveniles” because “the principles announced therein are equally applicable to an analysis under Section 13.”

Applying that framework here, the court reasoned that “one who did not kill another or intend to kill another during the commission of a felony is less morally responsible and less deserving of one of the most severe punishments—mandatory life imprisonment without the possibility of parole—than the actual murderer.” Yet a mandatory punishment scheme “fails to assess culpability regarding the intent to kill” and therefore, in combination with the extreme severity of LWOP, “poses a great risk of disproportionate punishment.”

Next, the court explained that criminal punishments must be proportionate not just to individual culpability, but also to some legitimate state purpose. And sentencing people to die in prison without any assessment of their individual culpability, and without any finding that they killed or intended to kill anyone, wholly fails to serve the general purposes of rehabilitation, deterrence, retribution, or incapacitating people who pose a danger to the public. If anything, the court explained, the Commonwealth’s punishment scheme undermines these goals, and is therefore cruel.

Given that automatically imposing LWOP for felony murder fails to align with either individual culpability or the accepted purposes of punishment, the court held it is “cruel” punishment and struck it down.