Justia Pennsylvania Supreme Court Opinion Summaries

Responding to adverse financial conditions in the Philadelphia School District, the Pennsylvania Legislature amended the School Code in the late 1990s by adding provisions to the Distress Law tailored to school districts of the first class. In this matter, the issue before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was whether legislation designed to help the Philadelphia School District recover from financial hardship violated the non-delegation rule. The Court held that Section 696(i)(3) of the School Code, 24 P.S. sec. 6-696(i)(3), was unconstitutional, violating the non-delegation rule of Article II, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. Accordingly Respondents’ actions taken pursuant to that provision were null and void, and Respondents were permanently enjoined from taking further action under the authority it conferred. View "W. Phila A.C.E. Sch. v. S.D. of Phila." on Justia Law

From 2010 to 2012, Appellant Freedom Medical Supply, Inc. (“Freedom”), provided electrical muscle stimulators (“EMSs”) and portable whirlpools to automobile accident victims covered by Appellee State Farm Fire and Casualty Company and/or State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company (collectively, “State Farm”). Notably, although Freedom purchased these items for relatively little cost, it applied significant markups. As found by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania herein, Freedom purchased the EMSs for approximately $20 to $30 each, yet charged approximately $1,525 to $1,600 each, and purchased the whirlpools for approximately $40 each, yet charged approximately $525 each. Because neither the EMSs nor portable whirlpools have a federally-determined Medicare fee, Freedom sought reimbursement from State Farm for 80% of the foregoing charges. State Farm denied Freedom's claims, and the district court ultimately agreed with State Farm when Freedom filed suit. Freedom appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which, noting that no Pennsylvania court or agency has addressed the question, sought to certify to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The question presented was: "[m]ay an insurer use methods not specifically identified in [the Motor Vehicle Financial Responsibility Law (MVFRL)] to calculate the 'usual and customary' charge for devices and services not listed on the Medicare Fee Schedule for purposes of determining the amount to be paid to providers of those devices and services?" In answer to the question submitted, the Supreme Court held that Section 69.43(c) of the MVFRL permitted, but did not require, that reimbursements be calculated predicated on the provider’s bill for services or the data collected by the carrier. View "Freedom Medical Supply v. State Farm" on Justia Law

In a discretionary appeal, the issue presented to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was whether the Transfer between Entities Act (a provision of the Public School Code designed to protect teachers affected by inter-school transfers of educational programs) applied where the transferred students were placed into pre-existing classes and no new classes added. The Central Westmoreland Career and Technology Center, a public vocational technical school (the “Vocational School”), provided career and technical training to high school students from numerous sending school districts within Westmoreland County, including Appellee Penn-Trafford School District (“Penn-Trafford”). For a number of years, the Vocational School taught math to students from the high schools in such districts who were enrolled in career and technical programs at the Vocational School. During this time, the sending school districts were providing the same math instruction to students in their high schools who were not enrolled at the Vocational School. In early 2010, eight sending school districts, including Penn-Trafford, advised the Vocational School that, beginning with the 2010-11 school year, they would be providing math instruction to the vocational students at the students’ home high schools rather than sending them to the Vocational School for math. Due to these changes, the Vocational School curtailed its math offerings and suspended five certified math teachers. The Supreme Court concluded that the transfer of students and the assumption of program responsibility by the receiving entity were alone sufficient to implicate the protections conferred under the Act. The Commonwealth Court's order was reversed and the matter remanded for further proceedings. View "CWC v. Penn-Trafford" on Justia Law

In July 2004, Appellant James Vandivner fatally shot his fiancee, Michelle Cable, for which he received the death penalty. Appellant appealed the denial of his petition for post-conviction relief, raising claims pertaining to his pre-trial, guilt, and penalty-phase proceedings. The PCRA court, having concluded Appellant’s claim did not have arguable merit, did not fully address Appellant's ineffectiveness of counsel claims. The Supreme Court concluded this omission required further review. It vacated the PCRA court’s order and remanded this matter back to the PCRA court for preparation of a supplemental opinion addressing whether any reasonable basis existed for trial counsel’s failure to investigate certain aspects of Appellant's ineffectiveness claims. View "Pennsylvania v. Vandivner" on Justia Law

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence for Richard Poplawski, convicted in 2011 of killing three Pittsburgh police officers. The officers were killed on April 4, 2009, when they responded to Poplawski's home for a domestic dispute with his mother. Poplawski, armed with multiple weapons, thousands of rounds of ammunition and body armor launched a gunfight with the city that lasted for hours. "The record shows that the jury balanced three aggravating circumstances against two statutory mitigating circumstances and determined that the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating circumstances. Therefore, there exists no ground to vacate the sentence." View "Pennsylvania v. Poplawski" on Justia Law

Appellant Lenwood Mason's convictions arose from the June 1994, stabbing death of Iona Jeffries, for which he received the death penalty. His first Post-Conviction Relief Act petition was dismissed, and he appealed. Appellant contended that the cumulative effect of errors committed by the trial court and trial counsel’s ineffectiveness prevented the jury from hearing important evidence relevant to making its guilt phase and sentencing determinations. He raised eleven claims of error on appeal to the Supreme Court. With respect to issues one through six, and eight through eleven, the Supreme Court affirmed the PCRA court. In issue seven, Appellant's PCRA petition was pending when the U.S. Supreme Court decided "Atkins v. Virginia," (536 U.S. 304 (2002)). With respect to issue seven, Appellant argued that under Atkins, he was ineligible for the death penalty, and that the PCRA court erred in permitting Appellant acting pro se (over trial counsel's objection), to "waive" this claim. The Supreme Court found that, "where confronted with neither a basic, fundamental decision concerning Appellant’s PCRA challenge nor disagreement between counsel and Appellant with respect to the overarching objectives of the challenge, the PCRA court erred in ruling that counsels’ authority to seek an Atkins hearing was subject to Appellant’s veto. Furthermore, by acting directly on Appellant’s pro se letter moving for the court to accept his waiver of the counseled Atkins claim, the PCRA court impermissibly invited hybridized representation." The Supreme Court reversed on issue seven and remanded this case for further proceedings. View "Pennsylvania v. Mason" on Justia Law

In 2011, Heather Forsythe and Appellant Patrick Haney presented at Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia with Forsythe’s four-year-old son, Trenton Lewis St. Clair. When Trenton arrived, he had neither a pulse nor signs of life. Forsythe and Appellant told emergency personnel that Trenton had fallen down a flight of stairs. Attempts to resuscitate the boy were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at the hospital. An examining physician's testimony at trial stated that it was “immediately evident that the child had been beaten. He was covered in bruises. There was blood around his mouth.” Forsythe gave a written statement to police explaining that she had observed Appellant physically abusing Trenton. Appellant would later be charged with first-degree murder and child endangerment. He ultimately received the death penalty for these crimes. His appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was automatic. After review, the Court concluded all of appellant's claimed of error at trial were meritless, and it affirmed his conviction and sentence. View "Pennsylvania v. Haney" on Justia Law

Through Pennsylvania’s Land Recycling and Environmental Remediation Standards Act, ("Act 2"), the General Assembly created a scheme for establishing “cleanup standards” applicable to voluntary efforts to remediate environmental contamination for which a person or entity may bear legal responsibility. Appellant EQT Production Company (“EPC”), owned and operated natural gas wells in the Commonwealth. In May 2012, the company notified Appellee, the Department of Environmental Protection (the “Department” or “DEP”), that it had discovered leaks in one of its subsurface impoundments containing water that had been contaminated during hydraulic fracturing operations. Subsequently, EPC cleared the site of impaired water and sludge and commenced a formal cleanup process pursuant to Act 2. In May 2014, the agency tendered to EPC a proposed “Consent Assessment of Civil Penalty,” seeking to settle the penalty question via a payment demand of $1,270,871, subsuming approximately $900,000 attending asserted ongoing violations. EPC disputed the Department’s assessment, maintaining that: penalties could not exceed those accruing during the time period in which contaminants actually were discharged from the company’s impoundment; all such actual discharges ended in June 2012; and the Act 2 regime controlled the extent of the essential remediation efforts. The issue this case presented for the Supreme Court's review centered on whether ECT had the right to immediately seek a judicial declaration that the DEP's interpretation of the Act was erroneous. The Court held that the impact of the Department’s threat of multi-million dollar assessments against EPC was sufficiently direct, immediate, and substantial to create a case or controversy justifying pre-enforcement judicial review via a declaratory judgment proceeding, and that exhaustion of administrative remedies relative to the issues of statutory interpretation that the company has presented was unnecessary. View "EQT Production Co. v. DEP" on Justia Law

Appellant, I.S. (“Mother”), had twin sons born in Serbia in 1998. In 2005, Mother married Appellee, A.S. (“Stepfather”) in Serbia and subsequently the family relocated to Pennsylvania. The parties and the children resided together until 2009 when the parties separated. Following their separation, Mother and Stepfather informally shared physical custody of the children, who were about eleven years of age. In 2010, Stepfather filed for divorce. Mother graduated from law school in May 2012 and took the California bar examination in July 2012, planning to relocate to California with the children at the end of September that year. In August 2012, Stepfather filed a complaint for custody of the children and an emergency petition to prevent Mother’s relocation, asserting that he stood in loco parentis to the children. In 2013, the trial court held a hearing on Mother’s various preliminary motions seeking to dismiss Stepfather’s complaint for custody for lack of standing. The trial court concluded that Stepfather indeed stood in loco parentis to the children, and therefore it denied Mother’s motions. The case proceeded to a full custody hearing. Mother filed a complaint for child support against Stepfather. Following a support conference on March 4, 2013, a support master dismissed Mother’s complaint reasoning that Stepfather owed no duty to support the children because he was not their biological father. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted review to determine whether a stepparent could be obligated to pay child support for his former spouse’s biological children when he aggressively litigated for shared legal and physical custody of those children, including the filing of an action to prevent his former spouse from relocating with them. The Court held that we hold that when a stepparent takes affirmative legal steps to assume the same parental rights as a biological parent, the stepparent likewise assumes parental obligations, such as the payment of child support. View "A.S. v. I.S." on Justia Law

The Supreme Court granted certiorari review in this matter to address divergent decisions in the lower courts pertaining to the statutory scheme governing chemical testing of persons suspected of DUI and related traffic offenses. The Commonwealth Court has consistently construed the “Implied Consent Law” at 75 Pa.C.S. 1547 to require a motorist to assent unequivocally to an official request to take whichever statutorily-prescribed chemical test police select "on pain of" automatic license suspension, whereas the Superior Court has determined a motorist’s compliance with the law if he responds to the official request by asking to take a reasonably practicable, prescribed test of his choosing. The issue presented by the lower court analyses for the Supreme Court's review was, specifically, whether a motorist who requests an alternative test to the officer’s preferred test exercises a statutory right or, instead, refuses to submit to chemical testing in violation of the Implied Consent Law so as to incur suspension of his operating privileges. The Supreme Court found no right to alternative chemical testing in Section 1547. In this case, Appellant's request for alternative chemical testing instead of the test offered by the officer at the moment of his arrest constituted a refusal under the Implied Consent law, and the Commonwealth Court was correct in its analysis appellant's DUI conviction under the Law. View "Nardone v. Dept of Transportation" on Justia Law