Stu Bykofsky has a column on Philly.com this morning entitled, “Inmate deserves to have courts keep their promises.” The column features Marcus Perez, an inmate who pled guilty in state court “because of bad information he was given by a judge, who urged Perez to take a plea bargain.” The judge who dispensed the incorrect information?
Judge Theodore McKee, then of Common Pleas Court, now chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, said that when he told Perez he would be eligible for parole, “I was dead wrong.”
McKee told him “life” didn’t mean “life” and, “You will not die in prison.”
But the law recently had changed to “life means life,” and McKee made a grievous error.
By the time Perez learned that the judge screwed up, the case had passed from McKee’s authority, which meant that he couldn’t correct his own mistake. Perez has filed many appeals, each pigheadedly opposed – first by D.A. Lynne Abraham, and now by Seth Williams.
Sad case.
Disclosure: Perez’s court-appointed counsel is Michael Wiseman, an accomplished Third Circuit advocate who was my supervisor when he was head of the Philadelphia federal defender’s capital habeas unit and I was an assistant federal defender.