Prison lifers asked Pennsylvania’s top court to change how unconstitutional sentences are undone

Stoneleigh Visiting Fellow Marsha Levick and Stoneleigh Fellow Jennifer Merrigan discuss the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s landmark ruling to strike down automatic life sentences for second-degree murder and its impact on existing sentences.

Nearly six months after Pennsylvania’s highest court struck down automatic life sentences for second-degree murder, four prisoners have asked the justices to extend that ruling to everyone still serving one — and to change how the state handles unconstitutional punishments going forward. […]

That broader request is, “in the most literal sense of the word, an extraordinary request for relief,” said Marsha Levick, cofounder of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, an organization at the center of a similar fight after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles but did not say whether the ruling applied retroactively.

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