PCRA Review

Challenging a conviction? Here’s how you can go about it.

What is the PCRA?

The PCRA, Pennsylvania’s Post-Conviction Relief act, allows individuals who are serving a sentence to challenge their conviction – on certain constitutional and statutory grounds. 

Here are the requirements and limitations you need to comply with so you can preserve your rights.

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Your Right to Review

Ineffective trial or appellate counsel

  • If your trial or appellate counsel were ineffective, you must make that claim within a year.
  • Ineffective assistance of counsel IS NOT a grounds for the direct appeal following conviction, which means it is sometimes mistakenly left out of the first PCRA.
  • If that happens, the claim for ineffective assistance of trial (or appellate) counsel is gone forever.

Newly Discovered Evidence

  • If there is newly discovered evidence, a PCRA must be filed within a year of that discovery, even if the discovery takes place years (or decades) after the conviction.
  • Newly discovered evidence must satisfy the requirement that it could not have been discovered earlier through the exercise of due diligence.

Brady Violation

  • A Brady violation occurs where important evidence was withheld from the criminal defendant before trial.
  • When suppression of meaningful evidence occurs, the Petitioner has grounds to request a new trial.
  • Thanks to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s “open filed policy,” it is easier to review police and prosecutor files to find possible Brady material.

Limitations

Online Review Manipulation

  • You cannot bring a claim if more than a year has passed since you learned of newly discovered evidence.
  • You cannot bring a claim where the newly discovered evidence is merely more support for a fact that was already known or could have been known through the exercise of due diligence.

Copyright and Intellectual Property

  • For evidence to be “newly discovered,” it must be something that could not have been discovered earlier through the exercise of due diligence. The courts recognize that a person’s ability to exercise due diligence is severely limited by being in prison.
  • You cannot re-litigate issues that were already addressed in a previous legal proceeding, such as trial or prior PCRA.

Frequently Asked
Questions

No. There is never a fee for submitting a case for review. Like many other post-conviction service organizations, we are inundated with requests to review cases. But we will review every submission we receive in order to see if it is a case where we can help. 

No. We are a legal services support organization. This means that we help you find a licensed attorney with experience in this area of practice, and then we support that attorney by offsetting costs and providing para-professional assistance with client contact, scheduling, and even some drafting.

Post conviction cases move at a much slower pace than other criminal and civil litigation. Court-imposed deadlines get moved all the time so that the petitioner can have a full and fair opportunity to establish their right to a new trial.

Not necessarily. Convicted people who are serving long sentences that are a direct result of police and/or prosecutorial misconduct are entitled to a new trial and do not have to affirmatively establish their actual innocence, although they often do.