Lawmakers Remain at Odds Over Unconstitutional Murder Sentences as Victims, Attorneys Fear Inaction

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When one of the men responsible for killing her brother agreed to plead to second-degree murder, the law’s lack of ambiguity made Melody Kocis Bartusek and her parents feel comfortable with the agreement.

He would be in prison forever, she said.

That same inflexibility moved Nancy Leichter to support the release of the two men who likely gave her father the shock that prompted his fatal heart attack.

They didn’t deserve to be in prison forever, she said.

In March, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life without parole for second-degree murder, the sentencing scheme that comforted Kocis Bartusek and outraged Leichter, was unnecessarily cruel under the state constitution.

Both women told Spotlight PA they understood the decision in Commonwealth v. Lee. Both said they know other cases differ from their own, and those distinctions need to be taken into account.

But lawmakers have divergent visions of how this charge should be handled, and disagree over what kind of case is representative.

The legislature had 120 days to figure out how to handle the charge going forward, and what to do about the 1,100 people sitting in prison on now-unconstitutional life sentences.

With just two days until the deadline, the Pennsylvania legislature has not come up with a process that would provide clarity to victims’ relatives like Kocis Bartusek and Leichter, defense attorneys and prosecutors, and those currently incarcerated.

The state Supreme Court declined to apply its ruling to people already serving life sentences, again deferring to the legislature to decide what should happen next.

But if the legislature fails to act, the matter will return to the high court. Both prosecutors and defense attorneys told Spotlight PA said they expect the ruling to become retroactive.

If that happens, a potential pathway to release will open for the more than 1,100 people currently serving life sentences for second-degree murder in Pennsylvania.

Attorney General Dave Sunday, county district attorneys and state Senate Republicans, including Lisa Baker (R., Luzerne), have drawn attention to offenders who intended to do something heinous even if they didn’t plan to kill — people like Joseph Kerekes.

In 2007, Kerekes and another man, Harlow Cuadra, broke into Bryan Kocis’ home, stabbed him repeatedly, cut his throat and set the house on fire. The pair wanted to eliminate a business rival, prosecutors alleged at trial.

“He truly was a remarkable human being, and the whole thing should have never happened,” Melody Kocis Bartusek said of her brother, who was also her best friend.

Kerekes was the son of a minister. He did not want to be seen as a murderer, Kocis Bartusek said. The Kocis family agreed to let Kerekes plead to second-degree murder, comforted by the fact that he would still face a life behind bars.

In June, Baker introduced legislation that would establish a mandatory minimum of 35 years for future offenders, with the possibility of a lower sentence in narrow circumstances. The legislation would also provide release consideration for those currently serving life, routing them through the parole board instead of the courts. The state Senate has twice passed a version of her bill with bipartisan support.

Baker and other Republicans have used Kocis Bartusek’s case to support their vision for a system that does not offer a “get out of jail free card” to people who pleaded guilty or were convicted. Kocis Bartusek supports the bill, she said.

But the state Senate’s solution is a nonstarter for many members of the House.

House Democrats and civil rights advocates have highlighted people who never meant to take a life: the getaway driver, the accidental arsonist, the desperate person who meant only to rob someone, but instead caused an injury and later a death — people like Reid and Wyatt Evans.

The brothers were teenagers when they carjacked Leichter’s father Leonard, who informed them he had a heart condition. They drove him to a payphone so he could call 911.

Leonard died shortly after of a heart attack, and the Evans brothers were convicted of second-degree murder. In the immediate aftermath, her family was “thrilled” to see the brothers locked up for life.

But when Leichter began to look into their case decades later, “What I realized,” she said, “is we were in so much grief and so much pain over his … loss that we weren’t even thinking about them.”

She supported the brothers at commutation, which they received in 2021.

“I just didn’t think that they should be defined by that, by that one terrible act,” she said.

Under Baker’s legislation, most people who already have convictions would still have to serve 35 years of their life sentence before parole eligibility, a period too long for lawmakers who argue the bill is overly proscriptive.

“From what the Supreme Court put out there, I think that their position on it is much more in line with where the advocates are,” said state Rep. Emily Kinkead (D., Allegheny), a member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Committee Chairman Tim Briggs (D., Montgomery) introduced a bill before the Lee decision that would establish parole eligibility after 20 years for adults and 15 years for minors. The bill was scheduled for a vote in April, but Briggs tabled it to give lawmakers more time to negotiate.

If lawmakers miss the deadline, they can still pass a solution at any time.

But once the deadline passes, the state Supreme Court decision will take effect, and petitions from lifers serving unconstitutional sentences will hit courts across the state.

The courts are prepared, said Shaakirrah Sanders, a dean and law professor at Penn State University whose scholarship covers sentencing and criminal procedure.

“I am very confident that Pennsylvania courts can handle this issue,” Sanders said.

They managed hundreds of resentencing cases in the aftermath of the United States Supreme Court ruling that mandatory life sentences were unconstitutional for defendants convicted as children. Courts can look at the lesser charges in the case, Sanders said, as well as other laws and sentencing guidelines as a reference.

“I think smart attorneys will be able to devise arguments at individual sentencing that judges find persuasive or not persuasive,” she said.

The juvenile cases were easier, said Keisha Hudson, chief public defender for Philadelphia.

“There was still a lot of work, but easier to gather because you were dealing with people who were children at the time, and we have adolescent brain science on our side,” she said.

The second-degree lifers will require more intensive review. The defendant’s culpability in many of the underlying cases will be more complicated than the getaway driver scenario, requiring more careful research into cases that are, in some instances, decades old.

Public defense offices, already struggling to manage large caseloads with meager resources, are bracing for years of litigation.

“We’re going to have to find records that may no longer exist, witnesses who may no longer be here,” Hudson said.

Her office handled 300 juvenile resentencings; there could be more than 500 second-degree petitions for resentencing in Philadelphia alone.

“Five-hundred cases is going to take over a decade,” she said.

Hudson strongly supports a process that runs through the parole board rather than the courts. “It would be fairer, it would be more just, it would be more efficient,” she said.

District attorneys are similarly eager for a legislative solution.

Chris de Barrena-Sarobe, Chester County’s district attorney, said his office has identified about two dozen cases it will need to work through should the state Supreme Court’s ruling become retroactive. That work will tax both his office and the victims who thought they could move on from the trial process and begin to “recover from the trauma,” he said.

But de Barrena-Sarobe took issue with the idea that there isn’t compromise to be had among prosecutors and defenders.

“There is not 100% agreement,” he said, but that’s typical. Different groups have a job to advocate for their position, he said, “to make sure that the judge has all the information to make the best decision.”

“We’ve both done that,” he said. “The judge here is the legislature, and they just don’t seem to want to make a decision. They need to step up and do their job. They understand each of our positions. Now, they have to find a path forward.”

Whatever solution the legislature comes up with, both Kocis Bartusek and Leichter, the women whose relatives were murdered, want the details and the intent in each case to matter.

Kocis Bartusek said: “I agree that if some people didn’t deserve a life sentence, that case specifically should be looked at, but culpability and intent also, because in my case, there was the intent to have my brother out of the picture.”

And Leichter said there are too many people who will die in prison “for something that they had no intent for, something never intended to happen.”

“I know people need to be punished, but I also think these are human beings.”

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