Thirty years after the crime that sent him to Pennsylvania’s death row and 15 years after his case was argued in the U.S. Supreme Court, David Sattazahn was resen­tenced to life with­out parole — the sen­tence he ini­tial­ly received in his first tri­al in 1991. Prosecutors, defense attor­neys, and the vic­tim’s fam­i­ly all agreed that a life sen­tence was the best out­come at this point in the case. Sattazahn was con­vict­ed of first-degree mur­der and the court sen­tenced him to life in prison in 1991 when his Berks County sen­tenc­ing jury split 9 – 3 in favor of a life sen­tence. After his life sen­tence, Sattazahn pled guilty to sev­er­al unre­lat­ed felony charges. His mur­der con­vic­tion was then over­turned as a result of prej­u­di­cial­ly inac­cu­rate jury instruc­tions, and in his retri­al, pros­e­cu­tors again sought the death penal­ty, using his guilty pleas as a new aggra­vat­ing cir­cum­stance. In 1999, he was retried and sen­tenced to death, becom­ing the first death-after-life-sen­tenced defen­dant under Pennsylvania’s death penal­ty statute. His appeal in that tri­al reached the U.S. Supreme Court (argu­ment, pic­tured), which ruled 5 – 4 in 2003 that the non-unan­i­mous jury vote in his case did not con­sti­tute a find­ing reject­ing the death penal­ty, even though it had result­ed in a life sen­tence. As a con­se­quence, the Court wrote, sub­ject­ing Sattazahn to a sec­ond cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion did not vio­late the Double Jeopardy clause of the U.S. Constitution. Sattazahn’s 1999 death sen­tence was over­turned in 2006 because of inef­fec­tive assis­tance of coun­sel. Faced with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a third sen­tenc­ing hear­ing and addi­tion­al appeals, the fam­i­ly of mur­der vic­tim Richard Boyer, Sr. agreed that drop­ping the death penal­ty in favor of life with­out parole would help bring them clo­sure. ​“Every time we try to get on with our lives, we’re back in court, reliv­ing that night again and again. There has to be an end to this mad­ness,” said Barbara Spatz, Boyer’s sis­ter. Senior Deputy Attorney General Anthony Forray said his office con­sult­ed with Boyer’s four chil­dren and four sib­lings before decid­ing to drop the death penal­ty. ​“No fam­i­ly should have to go through this,” Forray said. ​“The com­mon­wealth believes that what is occur­ring today is the appro­pri­ate thing to occur if this fam­i­ly is ever going to have clo­sure and if this is ever going to come to an end.” At a May 24, 2017 hear­ing in Reading, Pennsylvania, the Berks County Court of Common Pleas for­mal­ly resen­tenced Sattazahn to life.

(S. Weaver, ​“Sattazahn case takes twists and turns over the past 30 years,” The Reading Eagle, May 25, 2017; S. Weaver, ​“Prosecutors with­draw death penal­ty from Berks mur­der case,” The Reading Eagle, May 25, 2017.) Sketch of Supreme Court argu­ment in Sattazahn v. Pennsylvania by Dana Verkouteren. See Arbitrariness and Victims.

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