Castille reignites dispute over Pennsylvania death-penalty appeals

After reading the appeal from prison inmate Mark Spotz, incarcerated on four murder convictions, an angry Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille unleashed perhaps the most scathing language ever from the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court.

His target was not the killer; it was the highly specialized Capital Habeas Unit, 35 mostly federally funded defense lawyers who handle death-case appeals and whom Castille accused of legal "sabotage."

Spotz's cases have been in court for more than a decade. He was convicted in 1996 of four murders in four counties over three days. In three of the four trials, he was sentenced to death. Castille had before him a 100-page brief filed by four habeas unit lawyers and crammed with 70 claims. It appealed just one of Spotz's convictions.

So no matter the outcome, Spotz would remain in jail on his other death sentences.

To Castille, the massive legal document, and the government-funded work it represented, "bordered on the perverse."

It was an example, he wrote last month, of federal defense attorneys using an intentionally "abusive" strategy intended "exhaust as much of this court's time and resources as possible" and frustrate the legitimate exercise of the death penalty.

He called it, "The zealous pursuit of what is difficult to view as anything but a political cause: to impede and sabotage the death penalty in Pennsylvania."

On Friday, the federal defenders responded with their own lengthy written blast, calling the former Philadelphia district attorney's accusations "unwarranted" and "unfounded." They also denied a "suggestion" from Castille that using federal lawyers in state courts was a misuse of federal money.

Behind the unusual dispute is the fact that, although the death penalty is on the books, it is not used in Pennsylvania. There are 215 people on death row in the state, but no one has been involuntarily executed in about three decades. The last execution was in 1999, when torture-murderer Gary Heidnik voluntarily halted his appeals.

Long-running litigation in death-penalty cases has long angered prosecutors and some victims' relatives - particularly the spouses of police officers killed on duty - even as law enforcement officials concede there is a need for review. Most of the cases on appeal are more than a decade old, as Pennsylvania juries have become more reluctant to impose death in first-degree murder cases.