Nineteen years after having been sentenced to death in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, and five years after winning a new trial, Ronald Champney entered a no-contest plea to lesser charges in a plea deal that could soon set him free. Under the plea deal, which the court accepted on August 10, 2018, Champney agreed—without admitting guilt—that prosecutors had sufficient evidence for a jury to convict him of third-degree murder and possessing instruments of crime, and prosecutors withdrew charges of first-degree murder, burglary, aggravated assault, and other related offenses. The court resentenced Champney to a term of 10 to 20 years imprisonment, much of which he has already served. With death-penalty reversals and non-capital resentencings far outstripping new death sentences, Pennsylvania’s death row has fallen by 100 in the last 16 years—from 247 in April 2002 to 147 on August 1, 2018—without any executions. 170 Pennsylvania death-row prisoners have overturned their convictions or death sentences in state or federal post-conviction proceedings and Pennsylvania’s state courts have reversed an additional 100 death sentences on direct appeal. Champney’s case is one of 139 of the cases reversed in post-conviction to have completed retrial or resentencing, and he is one of the 135 defendants (97.1%) to be resentenced to life or less or acquitted. Of the prisoners who were resentenced to death, only three are still on death row, and another died before his post-conviction challenges to that sentence were adjudicated. Champney was convicted and sentenced to death in 1999 for a murder that occurred in 1992. In June 2008, the trial court overturned his death sentence because his lawyer failed to object to the prosecution’s presentation of victim-impact testimony that was not admissible under Pennsylvania law. The court also granted Champney a new trial, finding that his lawyer had been ineffective for failing to move to suppress statements police had improperly obtained from Champney while interrogating him without his lawyer being present. An equally divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the trial court’s ruling in April 2013, setting the stage for the plea agreement. On June 25, the Pennsylvania state senate’s Task Force and Advisory Committee on Capital Punishment issued a report describing the Commonwealth’s death-penalty system as seriously flawed and in need of major reform, in part because of high rates of constitutional error and substandard defense representation at trial.
(Peter E. Bortner, Champney leaves death row, pleads no contest to murder, Republican Herard, August 10, 2018.) See Pennsylvania and Sentencing.
