Pennsylvania's Groundbreaking Ruling Limiting Mandatory Life Sentences 

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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently issued a landmark ruling placing new state constitutional limits on punishments. Relying on the Pennsylvania Constitution’s prohibition against “cruel punishments” — and breaking with prior state precedent — Commonwealth v. Lee bars mandatory life in prison without parole for defendants convicted of felony murder. It’s the first time a state supreme court has recognized such limits. 

Lee is pathbreaking for many reasons, as Northeastern Law School Professor Martha Davis explains in her own thoughtful analysis of the ruling. To begin with, Lee offers new judicial constraints on felony murder, a widely used yet often criticized legal doctrine that allows a defendant to be charged with murder if they participate in a serious crime, such as a robbery, during which a person dies. 

As the Pennsylvania high court noted, felony murder has no intent requirement and “does not distinguish between the lookout, and the killer who pulls the trigger.” In Lee, the defendant, who was part of a robbery, wasn’t even in the room at the time the killing took place. Forty-eight states recognize some version of felony murder; Pennsylvania and ten other states provide for mandatory life sentences, as does federal law. 

Until now, constitutional challenges to draconian sentences like the ones that can arise in felony murder cases have generally hit the marble wall of the U.S. Supreme Court. Outside of restrictions on the death penalty and some limited protections for juveniles, the Court has recognized vanishingly few federal constitutional limits on disproportionate sentences. 

And while a number of state high courts have broken with the Supreme Court to recognize stronger state constitutional protections in the context of criminal punishment, these rulings have generally focused on sentencing limits based on age. In 2024, for example, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued its own watershed ruling barring life in prison without parole for individuals under the age of 21.

Lee, however, embraced a different and potentially much broader approach: assessing the cruelty of mandatory life in prison based on the characteristics of the offense, not the defendant. In its analysis, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court scrutinized the justifications for applying the same harsh penalty across the “wide variety of criminal conduct and varying culpability for a killing” reflected in felony murder convictions. Doing so is cruel, the court explained, because it imposes the harshest possible imprisonment penalty without any assessment of individual culpability. Nor, the court concluded, does imposing a mandatory life sentence under these circumstances meet any of the traditional justifications for punishment — rehabilitation, deterrence, retribution, or incapacitation. 

The court wrote forcefully about why the Pennsylvania Constitution provides stronger protections than the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. Textual differences were one key factor — Pennsylvania prohibits “cruel punishments” even if they are not unusual. 

The court also relied heavily on recent historical scholarship that identifies “a ‘distinctly Pennsylvanian’ view of punishment” rooted in Quaker values and Enlightenment ideals, which made the state’s constitutional framers particularly sensitive to concerns about individual culpability and the values of deterrence and reformation. The court drew a contrast with how the U.S. Supreme Court has evaluated the history of the Eighth Amendment in its own recent rulings, “emphasizing retribution as a justification for punishment and limiting its protections to punishments which have fallen out of use.” 

This reappraisal of history was also the court’s primary reason for breaking with a 44-year-old precedent in which it had held that the state constitution’s protections were coextensive with the Eighth Amendment. In a concurrence to Lee, Justice David Wecht went further to express skepticism of any decision tethering the meaning of the Pennsylvania Constitution to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. “When we hitch our jurisprudential wagon to the decisions of another, we unjustly bind our successors,” he observed.

I’ll conclude with a note to students and other researchers: The historical scholarship relied on by the court, which it describes as “groundbreaking,” was published only a few months after the author, Kevin Bendesky, graduated from law school. (Bendesky also summarized his research in State Court Report.) If you’re looking for your own research topics in this area, State Court Report’s Kathrina Szymborski Wolfkot and Nancy Watzman recently offered takeaways — with links to transcripts and videos — from an excellent 2024 symposium on state constitutions and punishment, organized by Rutgers University Law Review and the State Law Research Initiative and cosponsored by the Brennan Center.

I have lost count of the number of times I have wondered about the history of a particular state constitutional provision, only to find a complete absence of any relevant scholarship. As Lee highlights, there is much to unearth by digging into state constitutions — and tremendous opportunity for impact.

Alicia Bannon is editor in chief for State Court Report. She is also director of the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Suggested Citation: Alicia Bannon, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Limits Mandatory Life Sentences, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (April 7, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/pennsylvania-supreme-court-limits-mandatory-life-sentences