State Superior Court urges Supreme Court to review issues of brain maturity in convicts
The Pennsylvania Superior Court on Friday urged the state Supreme Court to review whether courts should take into consideration the level of brain development of convicted young adults when determining sentences.
The recommendation came as the Superior Court said it could not provide Avis Lee — who was convicted in 1981 of second-degree murder after participating in a robbery that turned fatal — the opportunity to challenge her sentence of life without parole.
Lee was 18 when she served as the lookout for a robbery in which her brother, Dale Stacy Madden, shot Robert Walker outside the Pittsburgh Athletic Association in Oakland.
Her conviction on the seconddegree murder charge carried a mandatory sentence of life without parole.
Lee decided to challenge the sentence after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in March 2016 that prohibited mandatory life-without-parole sentences for those younger than 18 applied retroactively to older cases, according to the Abolitionist Law Center, which is advocating on behalf of Lee.
The Abolitionist Law Center said the Supreme Court prohibited a sentence of life without parole upon any defendant whose crime “reflected the transient immaturity of youth.”
A person convicted of seconddegree murder who is under 18 years old but over 15 can be sentenced to a minimum term of 30 years in prison.
In her request to Superior
Court, Lee cited studies that could establish that her brain was underdeveloped at the time of her crime, and that she could not form the requisite intent for seconddegree murder.
The Superior Court responded by asking rhetorically that “there may not be any statistically significant difference between the mental maturity of a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, or an 18year-old and a 19-year-old, and so the question becomes, where do we draw the line?”
The Superior Court said it recognized that there was “vast expert research on the issue,” and encouraged the state Supreme Court to explore it further.
“If this matter were one of first impression and on direct appeal, we might expound differently,” the Superior Court said.
“However, we are an error-correcting court. Until the United States Supreme Court or the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recognizes a new constitutional right in a non-juvenile offender, we are bound by precedent.”