Pa. court returns case to county over ‘judicial vindictiveness’

The Pennsylvania Superior Court this week sent a convicted murderer’s case back to Allegheny County for resentencing and took the trial judge to task for not properly documenting the prior sentence and for appearing to have acted vindictively.

In a decision issued Wednesday, the appellate court ruled that Stevenson Leon Rose, 54, deserved a new sentence for the murder of Mary Mitchell of East Liberty.

The case will return to Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Kathleen A. Durkin for a third time. She did not respond to a request for comment.

Rose was originally sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison for aggravated assault and conspiracy in the 1993 attack on Ms. Mitchell, a prostitute, who remained in a vegetative state for years. When she died

in 2007 at age 50, prosecutors charged Rose and his accomplice, Shawn Sadik, with homicide.

They were convicted, and Judge Durkin imposed a new sentence of 20 to 40 years on Rose for third-degree murder. He appealed the sentence, arguing that he should have been sentenced under the guidelines at the time of the attack in 1993, not the harsher punishment for the same crime allowed at the time of Ms. Mitchell’s death in 2007.

In November 2015, the state Supreme Court ruled in Rose’s favor, meaning that he could face a maximum of up to 20 years in prison — which he had already served. The high court returned the case to Judge Durkin.

On July 7, 2016, Judge Durkin sentenced Rose to 10-20 years. This time, though, she made the sentence consecutive to the original sentence, meaning it would follow the first one, bringing his maximum time in prison to 50 years.

Rose appealed again. The process Judge Durkin used to arrive at the new sentence did not sit well with the Superior Court. A three-member panel determined that Judge Durkin did not sufficiently explain her reasoning for increasing Rose’s sentence.

The Superior Court noted that in his appeal, Rose cited his good behavior while in prison. He had been granted parole after serving 23 years; and he argued that he accepted responsibility for his crime and was remorseful. Judge Durkin, Rose claimed, did not mention any of that in her resentencing.

What she did say, according to the decision, was that she based the sentence “on the guidelines, everything I’ve heard, everything I heard at trial, just totality of the circumstances really.”

In its decision, the Superior Court said the trial court had to “affirmatively state its reasons” on the record for boosting Rose’s sentence.

“We do not find that the trial court’s pronouncement that [Rose’s] sentence was based on ‘everything [it] heard’ satisfied this burden,” the Superior Court ruled.

The decision also noted that rehabilitation is the “noblest pursuit of our criminal justice system” and said in light of Rose’s documented rehabilitation, the trial court “was obligated to provide objective information on the record as to why the protection of the public and the gravity of the offense outweighed [Rose’s] rehabilitative progress.”

In its final word, the Superior Court wrote that in the absence of any information about whether Judge Durkin considered evidence presented by Rose or on what basis she justified the stiffer sentence, “we must presume that [Rose’s] sentence resulted from judicial vindictiveness.”

In a concurring statement, President Judge Emeritus Correale F. Stevens left open the door for Judge Durkin to hand down the same sentence. He wrote, “This remand is without prejudice to the judge to exercise her sound discretion in imposing sentence so long as she states the reasons for doing so on therecord.”