United States ex rel. Matthews v. Johnson

OPINION OF THE COURT

ALDISERT, Circuit Judge.

This court is required to resolve a knotty Fourteenth Amendment problem in Pennsylvania murder trials which has evenly divided the justices on that state’s highest court.1 We are to decide whether, in a prosecution on a murder indictment, the Fourteenth Amendment requires the trial court, upon request, to give the jury the option of returning a verdict of voluntary manslaughter.2 Adopting a Magistrate’s Report and Recommendation, the district court reasoned that because Pennsylvania case law permits a jury verdict of voluntary manslaughter in the…