High Court

Lawyers for condemned Philadelphia killer Terrance Williams today filed documents with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court opposing the reinstatement of Wednesday's death penalty and asking Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille to recuse himself from the appeal. The motion asking Castille to disqualify himself is based on Castille's role as Philadelphia District Attorney in 1986, when a Common Pleas Court jury sentenced Williams to death for the 1984 murder of Amos Norwood. Castille, as the city's chief prosecutor, approved the decision to seek the death penalty and to defend the sentence after Williams' lawyers challenged it on appeal.

      Signaling that it will tolerate "no voter disenfranchisement," a divided state Supreme Court is sending the dispute over Pennsylvania's new voting law back to a lower court to decide whether the state is doing enough to get photo ID cards to voters who need them. In a 4-2 ruling issued Tuesday, the high court ordered Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr., who upheld the law in August, to file a supplemental opinion on whether the alternate-ID programs set up by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and state election officials are providing the "liberal access" to ID cards that the legislature intended.

IF YOU THINK about Tuesday's order from the state Supreme Court on voter ID, it really does make perfect sense. At least in Pennsylvania. It's what we've come to expect here in the land of low expectations. The court, facing a timely decision on the state's nationally watched ID law, decided not to decide. Instead, it kicked the controversial issue back down to a lower court - a court that already stressed that whatever it decided was ultimately to be decided by the state Supreme Court.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan's prime minister told a Supreme Court panel Tuesday that his government would no longer stand in the way of a revival of a long-standing graft case in Switzerland against President Asif Ali Zardari, a decision that could help tamp down tensions in the bitterly contentious relationship between Zardari's government and the country's judiciary. The decision represents a significant turnaround in strategy for Zardari's ruling Pakistan People's Party, which for nearly three years has resisted the high court's demand to rescind a 2008 notification from the Pakistani government to Swiss authorities that corruption proceedings against Zardari in that country be dropped.

HARRISBURG - The marquee case Thursday before the state Supreme Court may be the state's new voter-ID law, but the justices will also hear arguments on another high-profile voting matter: what Pennsylvania's legislative districts will look like for much of the next decade. The high court is to consider challenges on Thursday to proposed new maps for Pennsylvania's 203 House and 50 Senate districts. The maps were drawn in April by a bipartisan panel, consisting mostly of legislators, that is charged with recasting legislative boundaries every 10 years based on census changes.

Patricia Moore Grant said that when she saw her brother Richard last week, he was optimistic, a state of mind perhaps understood only by a 42-year-old man who has been serving a no-parole life sentence since he was 14. On Wednesday, Grant seemed also to be a believer. "I think we're going to have a positive outcome," Grant said with a grin as the six sitting justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court left their ornate City Hall courtroom after 90 minutes of argument about what to do with more than 400 inmates - Richard Moore among them - serving life without parole for murders committed before they were 18. All the Pennsylvania inmates - and about 2,500 more in 27 other states - were given fresh hope of some day getting out of prison on June 25, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life terms without parole were unconstitutional for convicted killers who committed their crime as juveniles.

TRENTON - A sharply divided New Jersey Supreme Court on Wednesday made it harder for prosecutors to try juvenile defendants in adult court. The high court's 3-2 ruling stemmed from a case in which three juveniles were accused of beating and robbing a Woodbridge man in 2009. The majority concluded the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office didn't adequately show that trying the three in adult court - which would subject them to longer sentences if convicted - was necessary for deterrence.

Patricia Moore Grant said that when she saw her brother Richard last week, he was optimistic, a state of mind perhaps understood only by a 42-year-old man who has been serving a no-parole life sentence since he was 14. On Wednesday, Grant seemed also to be a believer. "I think we're going to have a positive outcome," Grant said with a grin as the six sitting justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court left their ornate City Hall courtroom after 90 minutes of argument about what to do with more than 400 inmates - Richard Moore among them - serving life without parole for murders committed before they were 18. All the Pennsylvania inmates - and about 2,500 more in 27 other states - were given fresh hope of some day getting out of prison on June 25, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life terms without parole were unconstitutional for convicted killers who committed their crime as juveniles.

NEARLY THREE months after the U.S. Supreme Court declared mandatory life-without-parole sentences unconstitutional for minors, the state's Supreme Court justices heard suggestions for what to do about the 500 inmates already serving that sentence. But the only thing clear after Wednesday's 90-minute hearing at City Hall: There's no easy answer. A ruling could take months. The issue is huge in Pennsylvania, which leads the nation - and the world - in the number of juveniles it condemns to prison for life.

LAST MONTH, when Commonwealth Court Judge Robert K. Simpson upheld Pennsylvania's onerous voter-ID law, he admitted that at least 82,000, and maybe more, citizens would have to make a substantial effort to obtain the proper identification to continue to vote - unlike their fellow citizens who drive or happen to have other acceptable ID. "[The] provisions are neutral and nondiscriminatory and apply uniformly to all voters," Simpson wrote in his opinion, saying he "was convinced that [the law]