Joseph Szuchon lived with his girlfriend in the city until she broke up with him and moved to Erie. In 1981, he fatally shot her there in a cornfield. In 2001, a federal appeals court threw out his death sentence, and Szuchon now is serving life.
In just the last seven years in Pennsylvania, an estimated 50 inmates who were facing execution have gotten new leases on life behind bars, as federal and state judges overturn death sentences at a rate that is buoying opponents of capital punishment and infuriating prosecutors.
Departures from Pennsylvania's death row - with 225 residents, the fourth largest behind California, Florida and Texas - have roughly equaled arrivals since 2000, and could soon eclipse them.
The appeals pipeline is clogged with condemned inmates fighting for life without parole, at the very least. Also since 2000, about 75 of them have scored significant interim victories - new sentencing hearings or retrials - typically after courts found serious legal errors in the way their original cases were tried.
Eyes around the world have been focused on one in particular: Mumia Abu-Jamal, on death row for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.
A federal judge concluded in 2001 that Abu-Jamal should get a new sentencing hearing, a decision that was quickly appealed. He awaits a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where the case was argued in May.
Meanwhile, well out of the public spotlight, state and federal judges have been ruling in favor of other Pennsylvania death-row inmates, including three in just the last two weeks. A convicted murderer from Bucks County got his death sentence changed to life in prison; one from Washington County was granted a retrial; and one from Philadelphia won a new sentencing hearing.
