HARRISBURG, Pa. — Two men accused of homicide and facing a potential death sentence if convicted asked Pennsylvania’s highest court Tuesday to restrict a county prosecutor’s pursuit of the death penalty, accusing him of misusing it to pressure defendants into guilty pleas or get them to turn state’s evidence.
The two defendants filed a petition before the state Supreme Court that suggests a range of actions to limit Washington County District Attorney Jason Walsh’s discretion in asking for capital punishment.
“The arbitrary seeking of the death penalty has become a crisis in Washington County, where a wildly disproportionate number” of the state’s prosecutorial death penalty notices of aggravating factors are filed, wrote lawyers for Jordan Clarke and Joshua George. They say Walsh, a Republican appointed in 2021 and elected to keep the job nearly two years ago, has sought the death penalty in 11 of the county’s 18 homicide cases during his term in office.
Walsh on Tuesday disputed the numbers, saying the county has had more than 18 homicide cases over that period. He said several of the cases during his tenure have involved the deaths of children, where one of the aggravating factors required for the death penalty, the young age of the victim, is simple to demonstrate in court.
“If it fits under the law, prosecutors can seek the death penalty,” Walsh said in a phone interview. “That’s just the law.”
The petition asks the justices to adopt “some or all” of the changes they want. They are asking for Walsh to be required to have an out-of-county judge, the attorney general’s office or a court-appointed special master review decisions to seek the death penalty; to stop the death penalty from being pursued in the cases of the two petitioners; and to get an outside judge to review all death penalty cases filed since the year Walsh took office.
Washington County is a suburban and rural area of more than 200,000 people with a history of coal mining and gas drilling in the state’s southwesternmost corner, about 28 miles (45 kilometers) southwest of Pittsburgh.
“No county has a bottomless well of money to fund defense teams representing indigents facing capital punishment,” lawyers with the Philadelphia-based Atlantic Center for Capital Representation argued in asking the justices to take the unusual step of accepting a case without an underlying appeal. “The excessive, abusive, and coercive use of the death penalty by District Attorney Walsh has surely strained Washington County’s ability to fund constitutionally adequate defenses.”
As an example, the filing describes how the prosecutor’s office upgraded a woman’s charge of conspiracy to commit homicide to add criminal homicide after being told by defense lawyers that conspiracy was not sufficient to face a death penalty. She spent nearly four years in jail before the case was dismissed. Walsh said there is evidence supporting the case and he plans to appeal the dismissal.
In Clarke’s case, involving a 2-month-old boy’s death, the petition alleges Walsh “intervened to improperly influence the manner of death determination, filed homicide charges and a notice of aggravators before the manner of death was determined, and is pursuing a death sentence based on facially inappropriate aggravating circumstances.”
Walsh said state and federal courts have long upheld the legality of the death penalty. In Pennsylvania, only three people have been executed since the 1970s, and all had given up on their appeals. Appeals and natural deaths have shrunk Pennsylvania’s death row from well over 200 two decades ago to 94 inmates currently.
“This is nothing but a liberal Hail Mary from a liberal think tank,” Walsh said of the newly filed court petition. “Those allegations are nonsensical and without merit.”