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I’m writing to share some long-awaited and very exciting news:
Earlier today, in a landmark ruling in ALC’s Commonwealth v. Derek Lee case, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found mandatory life without parole to be an unconstitutional punishment for felony murder, thereby giving a second chance and the start of a pathway to freedom to more than 1000 people serving this sentence in PA.
The upshot, as ALC’s legal director Bret Grote put it so powerfully, is that “as of this morning, more than 1000 people are serving an unconstitutional sentence in Pennsylvania.”
As someone who was sentenced to a mandatory life without parole/death by incarceration sentence, I know what it’s like to live with the prospect of dying in prison.
I also know the jubilation and hope that comes when learning that burden has been lifted.
Today, through the efforts of our legal team led by Bret, the Abolitionist Law Center lifted that burden from the backs of more than 1,000 people condemned to die in PA’s prisons.
In doing so, the path to freedom has been opened to people who were written off as disposable, and many will be eligible for release through resentencing or parole.
Abolishing death by incarceration has come a step closer to reality in Pennsylvania, and the Lee decision was the culmination of a movement of incarcerated people, their family members and formerly incarcerated people fighting for decades to abolish this sentence.
This win however is not for us to rest our hats on.
To the contrary, we at ALC will not rest until all DBI sentences are abolished in Pennsylvania, and will continue fighting to ensure that a system that treats human beings and the communities we come from as disposable is dismantled.
My abolitionist North Star — and ALC’s — has always been freedom, from knowing what it’s like to be deprived of it…but also what it’s like to regain it!
“When we fight we win” is not a slogan to us, it is a reality manifested every time one of us who was sentenced to die in prison wakes up and stares into the mirror a free human being.
-Robert Saleem Holbrook, ALC executive director
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