Page 34 - David Wecht News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

The state Supreme Court is requiring the state Department of Corrections to pay legal fees to the Herald-Standard after the justices found the agency acted in “bad faith and willful and wanton behavior” in its response to the newspaper’s open records requests several years ago. The decision Tuesday upholds a previous lower court ruling from 2018 that the DOC should pay $118,458 in legal fees to Uniontown Newspapers Inc., the newspaper’s parent company, for costs associated with procuring documents associated with the open records request. Michael Joyce, an attorney for the...

State supreme court rejects Faulkner widow’s ‘evidence-free’ effort to block Mumia appeal It's a new chance to challenge the murder conviction. Mumia Abu-Jamal, the prison journalist long known as the “voice of the voiceless” for his compelling writings and short audio tapes about life behind bars, moved a step closer to getting a chance for a reconsideration of his earliest appeal of his conviction — an allegedly flawed Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing in 1995, as well as three other later PCRA appeals of aspects his case, all ignored and their findings ...

Judge John Cleland, who was appointed to serve as a special master in the case, wrote that Faulkner "failed to establish the existence of a direct conflict of interest" or "an appearance of impropriety" that would prevent the District Attorney's Office from handling such appeals, according to court documents. Justices Kevin Dougherty, David Wecht, and Christine Donohue agreed with Cleland's findings, though in the concurring statement dismissing Faulkner's petition, Dougherty wrote that Faulkner had "exposed several grave and alarming allegations concerning District Attorney Krasner and his o...

Barrier to Mumia’s appeal dismissed: Case can move forward By Betsey Piette posted on December 17, 2020 Philadelphia A significant roadblock to Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal of his unjust 1982 murder conviction was removed on Dec. 16, when Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices dismissed an attempt by the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police to obtain a change of venue in the case. With this new ruling, all of Abu-Jamal’s pending appeals and motions in the Pennsylvania Superior Court will move forward from where they left off in February, when the state Supreme Court stayed all proceedings ...

Leviathan Chases Its Tail So here is why the case was thrown out in Pennsylvania: The state Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the lawsuit on Nov. 28, saying the GOP had waited too long to challenge the law. “Unsatisfied with the results of that wager, they would now flip over the table, scattering to the shadows the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians,” Justice David Wecht wrote. “It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters.” Yo, Wecht: you mean the will of the Dimocrats. And here is why the Texas case was...