Commonwealth v. Sullivan

By entertaining the present appeal at No. 121 the Court, in my judgment, turns Pennsylvania appellate jurisprudence in criminal cases on its head, and seriously compromises the integrity of the appellate process. The salutary procedures of post-conviction relief have been misapplied so as to wipe out, by the well-meaning but misguided order of a common pleas judge, a decision of and opinions previously filed by this Court. More specifically, this Court has been told by the common pleas court — which the majority now says had the right so to do — that the legal counsel who represented the…