Summary

  • A joint ProPublica and Philadelphia Inquirer investigation documented approximately 200 Pennsylvania post-conviction cases over the last fifteen years in which court-appointed lawyers filed nothing for a year or longer, and attributed the pattern to four interacting structural components — state funding, county contracts, judicial practice, and a missing qualification floor.
  • Those four components reinforce one another in a single feedback dynamic: Pennsylvania’s one-year prisoner-filed deadline hands cases to counsel appointed without qualification standards, who under flat-fee contracting default to no-merit filings, which judges accept in the absence of contract-level oversight.
  • Court dockets obtained by the investigation show Delaware County attorney Scott Galloway granted forty-one extensions over nine years on Nolan O’Neal’s case before filing a two-page brief addressing one of the issues O’Neal had raised, and Chester County ending its contract with Charles Thomas Jr. in 2025 after determining he had averaged roughly five hours per week across roughly twenty-five cases.
  • The August state court committee proposal recommends that appointed counsel have relevant work experience “to the extent practicable” but addresses only one component of the four-component interaction; the available evidence predicts this would leave attorney inactivity and reliance on no-merit letters essentially unchanged.

A joint ProPublica and Philadelphia Inquirer investigation published on October 13 has documented years of attorney inaction in approximately 200 Pennsylvania post-conviction cases over the last fifteen years, attributing the pattern to four interacting structural components — state funding, county contracts, judicial practice, and a missing qualification floor — rather than to the conduct of individual lawyers. The review, based on a decade of court dockets and public-records requests filed with courts serving all sixty-seven Pennsylvania counties, found delays stretching nineteen years without a single filing, pay as low as five hundred dollars per case, and docket records showing lawyers granted dozens of extensions without acting on their clients’ claims. The news organizations also reported that Pennsylvania contributes just fifty-seven cents per resident toward indigent defense while neighboring states on average contribute twenty-six dollars per resident, and that only one of the state’s sixty-seven counties requires written work-experience criteria for lawyers seeking post-conviction appointments. The investigation traces the documented delays to a self-reproducing architecture in which the four components reinforce one another across the same docket.

The Four-Component Architecture

The mechanism the investigation reconstructs treats post-conviction delay as the predicted output of an interaction among four structural features rather than as the result of any common individual culprit.

The first component is state funding. Pennsylvania began contributing any money to indigent defense only in 2023, the investigation reported, and contributes fifty-seven cents per capita today against a neighboring-state average of twenty-six dollars per resident. A pending American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit alleges the funding arrangement produces widespread violations of the right to counsel.

The second component is the county contract structure. The news organizations obtained eighteen county contracts through public-records requests and reported that only five included any limit on the number of cases a court could assign; none set deadlines, specified a time commitment, or described any oversight mechanism. About three-quarters of Pennsylvanians live in counties that use flat-fee arrangements or cap the amount a lawyer can bill for a case, with pay appearing as low as five hundred dollars per case in some counties. Maine’s published workload standard — one of the only state-level standards the article cites — would price a five-hundred-dollar arrangement at roughly eleven dollars per hour. Twenty-one of sixty-seven counties offer flat annual pay for part-time lawyers. The American Bar Association has long opposed flat-fee pay structures; Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada have banned them. Daniel Buzard, court administrator of the county where Corrie Woods held a contract several years ago, told the investigation that the structure “provides financial stability for both parties.”

The third component is judicial practice. Pennsylvania courts state that post-conviction counsel should act “expeditiously so as to reduce unnecessary delays.” Court dockets show judges have granted extensions liberally and frequently failed to impose any deadlines. A 2023 Pennsylvania Superior Court ruling flagged a Wayne County matter in which, the court wrote, “the PCRA court did nothing in this case for twenty years”; the underlying case had been assigned a lawyer who filed what the court called “a two-page, deficient motion to withdraw.” The procedural structure compounds the issue: Pennsylvania prisoners must write the first draft of their own post-conviction filing within a strict one-year deadline before any lawyer is appointed to revise, while the lawyers appointed to revise are not generally held to any timeline.

The fourth component is the qualification floor. Pennsylvania has published no best practices, no caseload guidelines, no required training, and no qualification standards for lawyers seeking post-conviction appointments. Only one of sixty-seven counties provided written criteria requiring specific work experience. North Carolina requires appeals lawyers seeking court appointments to apply with the state appellate defender, submit references, demonstrate relevant work history, provide legal writing samples, and complete a training course on strategy and best practices; Ohio has long enforced work-experience requirements. Philadelphia requires a training session and recent handling of three hearings involving disputed evidence, but the volunteer panel tasked with approving prospective lawyers rarely meets and is not empowered to approve or reject candidates based on writing samples.

How the Components Reinforce One Another

The four components form a single feedback dynamic rather than four independent shortcomings. The one-year prisoner-filed deadline forces a discrete package of work into court hands without the structural apparatus — qualification floor, contracted oversight, judicial deadlines — that other indigent-defense systems supply. Counsel appointed under no qualification standard face caseloads set by contract rather than by capacity. Flat-fee contracting, Corrie Woods told the investigation, inverts the work incentive: “These cases are not going to take priority in most law offices…Your incentive is to do the least work. You’re not getting more for doing more.” Judges, working under no deadlines of their own, have granted the extensions that produce the docket signatures on which the pattern rests.

Public defender Ted Skaarup, who has advocated for training and qualification rules, told the investigation that the resulting practice environment channels inexperienced lawyers into consulting older attorneys who pass on existing habits. “You go to them for advice,” Skaarup said, “and they say, ‘I’ll send you a copy of my [no-merit] letter.’” Rob Perkins, executive director of the Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice, characterized the contracting environment as follows: “There’s no quality control. Lawyers can get away with doing a poor job in these cases for years without anyone really paying attention.” Jennifer Merrigan, co-founder of the nonprofit Phillips Black, said of the no-merit filing practice: “I do not know how you can evaluate trial counsel’s performance, which is the main role of post-conviction counsel, without talking to your client and reading trial counsel’s file.”

The investigation documents that counties where all four components operate adversely — Washington County ($25,000 part-time for up to twenty-four cases), Delaware County (Galloway handling twenty to thirty post-trial cases per year as part-time work while running his own practice and, for a time, holding local elected office), and Chester County before 2025 (Thomas averaging roughly five hours per week across roughly twenty-five cases) — produce the documented pattern. Counties that have addressed only one component appear in the article as partial correctives rather than as fully resolved sites: Erie County after the Miller discipline more than doubled pay to $46,800 and added benefits, but the article does not report added oversight, qualification standards, or judicial deadlines. Philadelphia maintains a training-session-and-three-hearings requirement, but the volunteer approval panel rarely meets and is not empowered on writing samples. Under the mechanism the investigation reconstructs, a county that doubles pay without adding qualification standards, case-count limits, or judicial deadlines would continue to produce the documented pattern, with the difference concentrated in which actors absorb the workload rather than in the output the system produces.

The Cases That Anchor the Pattern

Two cases the investigation followed in detail illustrate how the four-component dynamic operates at the level of an individual file.

Nolan O’Neal was twenty years old and a high school student when Chester police arrested him in 2005 on the strength of four eyewitness identifications; at his 2005 trial, all four witnesses recanted, saying police had pressured them to accuse him. Attorney Scott Galloway was appointed to handle O’Neal’s Post Conviction Relief Act petition in 2013, eight years into O’Neal’s incarceration. Court records show Galloway filed one unsuccessful request for evidence and then asked for more time. In 2020, after thirty-two extensions, Galloway wrote to the judge overseeing O’Neal’s case: “I am still in the process of interviewing individuals.” In 2022, after forty-one extensions, Galloway filed a two-page brief that addressed only one of the issues O’Neal had wanted him to raise. O’Neal wrote Galloway dozens of letters from state prison proposing legal arguments and sending leads to investigate. “It is a daunting and exhausting task to navigate this legal process and be heard,” O’Neal told the investigation. “We at times even have to fight the attorneys who are supposed to represent us.” O’Neal wrote directly to the judge: “Dear Judge Pagano: I am writing to your attention as I have grave and urgent concerns about my current appointed attorney Scott D. Galloway, who you have appointed to represent me on my PCRA petition pending in your court…This is the best I can do to bring matters to your attention as my filings are going unanswered.”

In 2020, O’Neal received a letter from the brother of the murder victim admitting his prior testimony against O’Neal had been a lie: “I want to fix it. I know my brother would want me to. It’s been long enough,” the brother wrote. O’Neal said he pleaded with Galloway to track the man down; the 2022 filing attached the brother’s signed statement but mentioned none of the other issues O’Neal had raised nine years earlier or the other witnesses who had come forward. The judge began the process of dismissing the claim, partly because the filing was made too late. Galloway declined to comment on the case, citing ethical confidentiality rules. Judge George A. Pagano, who granted the forty-one extensions, declined to comment. Delaware County post-trial matters are handled by a group of part-time lawyers; Galloway has handled twenty to thirty post-trial cases per year for the county while running his own law practice and, for a time, holding local elected office. O’Neal is fighting his case with a new court-appointed lawyer.

Patrick Hickson’s case illustrates how the same architecture produces the same delay through a different local configuration. Hickson was convicted in a 2018 shooting case. His trial lawyer failed to call a single witness, admitting to the judge mid-trial that he had wrongly assumed the prosecutor would send a summons to an eyewitness who had told police Hickson was not the shooter. Attorney Charles Thomas Jr. was appointed to handle Hickson’s post-conviction matter; Hickson spent two years trying to get Thomas to track down that witness. In 2025, Chester County abruptly ended its contract with Thomas after determining he had averaged roughly five hours per week across roughly twenty-five cases; court dockets showed Thomas had left cases untouched as long as two years. When Hickson finally reached Thomas by phone in August 2025, Thomas told him he was off the case, telling Hickson “the courts told him he was taking too long.” Chester County court administrator Jordan Ludwick resolved the problem by hiring Shannon McDonald to take over the contract. McDonald described the transition as “not an easy transition…There were many cases that had not been touched at all,” and cleared the inherited backlog by filing seventeen briefs in just over three months — “all but three” no-merit letters. McDonald said of the resulting practice: “The case has to survive on the merits, and, frankly, the deck is stacked against overturning a case.” The Finley letter McDonald sent Hickson in March blamed him for failing to track down the would-be witness and said his trial lawyer had a strategic reason for not sending a subpoena. Hickson told the investigation that reading the letter was devastating. “I felt defeated,” he said. McDonald has since asked to drop the case, and Hickson is pursuing exoneration alone.

Additional cases in the corpus underscore the geographic spread of the pattern. In Erie County in 2021, a court pulled fifty cases from attorney James P. Miller and eventually reported him for discipline, citing extreme delays that cost some clients their appeal rights; his law license was later suspended. Lee Mandell, a Philadelphia attorney practicing more than fifty years, sent a Finley letter in 2017 saying he had written to but never spoken with his client of four years and did not understand his claims: “It is entirely unclear as to what the defendant really means.” The letter failed to flag an erroneous jury instruction that four years later led to the conviction being overturned; Mandell was later formally reprimanded for allowing another client’s hearing to be delayed six years, during which two witnesses died. When Corrie Woods took over Washington County’s post-conviction caseload in 2020, he discovered about a dozen files that had been untouched since being assigned to the previous lawyer in 2019 or earlier; in some of those cases, the lawyer’s inaction had caused clients to lose their appeal rights. Stuart Wilder, who handled post-conviction cases in Bucks County under a contract that he said “kept the lights on in his law office for years,” told the investigation: “Being able to file Finley letters gave me the time to work on cases I could fix.”

The Aggregate Scale and Comparator States

The cases above are illustrative rather than exhaustive. The investigation reported that, statewide, nearly two hundred cases in the last fifteen years saw lawyers appointed then file nothing at all over the span of a year or longer before being replaced. One of those cases stagnated for almost seven years before a new attorney picked up the file; another man was appointed five lawyers over eight years, dockets show, none of whom filed anything on his behalf. In Philadelphia alone, about sixty-five people waited three to eight years for a no-merit letter — a filing urging the judge to reject claims raised by the client in handwritten or typed submissions. The Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica have previously reported that the no-merit letter is discouraged in several other states and that, in Philadelphia, about three-quarters of lawyers who ended up filing such letters did not take basic steps such as meeting with their client, tracking down the trial lawyer’s file, or obtaining available discovery; the prior reporting also found that dozens of people who received such letters later had their convictions or sentences overturned based on issues their lawyers had rejected or overlooked.

The Political Economy and the Self-Reproducing Architecture

The reasons the architecture reproduces itself, the investigation reports, are documented in a 2003 law review article authored by court officials. The article outlined needed reforms but acknowledged the lack of political will, attributing the “low status” of these cases to a bias among judges and lawyers who believe “that most post conviction claims are frivolous.” The four-component interaction reproduces itself not because any single component forces it, but because the combination of low status, no political will, and an absence of measurable accountability allows each component to operate without correction from the others.

The investigation’s audience-modeled reading of the political economy tracks four constituencies with distinct traction. For a constitutional-rights audience, the documented pattern is offered as evidence that Pennsylvania is failing to meet the Post Conviction Relief Act’s statutory promise of effective representation regardless of ability to pay, with the cohort of roughly sixty-five Philadelphia residents who waited three to eight years for no-merit letters cited as the indication. For a judicial-administration audience, the documented judicial conduct is itself part of the pattern: the Superior Court’s twenty-year Wayne County finding and the Delaware County extensions constitute the record on which an internal reform case rests. For a defense-bar and professional-standards audience, the structure offloads the regulatory problem onto the lowest-status segment of indigent defense — the framing with the least operational traction because it depends on self-regulation by the segment currently exercising the practice. For a fiscal-responsibility audience, the structural choice is not cost-saving: wrongful-conviction civil settlements, continued incarceration of factually innocent people, and downstream retrial costs are the cost-shifting the flat-fee structure produces. This last framing has the most operational traction because comparable jurisdictions — Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada — have already legislated against the arrangement.

What Happens Next: Reform Proposals and Their Predicted Interaction Failures

Reform energy is concentrated in five places. The August state court committee proposal recommends that appointed counsel have relevant work experience “to the extent practicable,” arguing that work experience is not “possible to quantify” and that “less-than-experienced representation is better than no representation.” Erie County has more than doubled lawyer pay to $46,800 and added benefits after the Miller case. Philadelphia requires a training session and three-hearings experience for prospective post-conviction counsel. The Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice runs voluntary trainings, a resource center with office hours, a library of sample motions, and help with social-service referrals. The pending ACLU litigation challenges the funding arrangement as a structural violation of the right to counsel.

The mechanism the investigation reconstructs predicts specific interaction failures for each of these, considered separately or in combination. A qualification rule adopted without a compensating pay increase or caseload reduction risks substituting a different access-to-counsel crisis for the documented delays, as qualified lawyers decline flat-fee appointments. The August committee proposal does not impose caseload limits, contractual oversight, or judicial deadlines — the three other components the investigation identifies — so the workload-to-capacity mismatch Woods described would persist under any new qualification rule. The leading indicator that the qualification component had begun to fail, considered in isolation, would accumulate in the same register as the cases the investigation documented: additional years of attorney inactivity, additional no-merit letters filed in matters where clients had raised claims their lawyers had not investigated.

A funding-only reform faces a different interaction failure. The Erie County compensation increase addresses the funding component but not the qualification floor or the contract structure. The load-bearing premise that money alone produces quality is unsupported by the available evidence; the mechanism predicts a different actor absorbing the workload rather than a different system output. Strict qualification standards without compensating caseload reduction could produce an access-to-counsel crisis in which qualified lawyers decline flat-fee appointments entirely. Voluntary initiatives — Pittsburgh ALIJ and the Philadelphia session-and-three-hearings requirement — substitute for contract-level standards not adopted, and voluntary training without enforcement reproduces the absence of standards the documentation describes. Prosecutions of individual attorneys — Miller in Erie, Mandell in Philadelphia, Thomas in Chester — address specific cases without altering the structural pattern across the sixty-seven counties.

The Strongest Opposing Case

Five anchors, grounded in the article’s own content, support a steelmanned opposition to the investigation’s structural claim.

First, the investigation documents roughly two hundred cases over fifteen years in a state with sixty-seven counties; the universe of post-conviction matters that closed without documented delay during the same period is not supplied. A structural claim over a state-level pattern requires denominator data the article does not provide.

Second, experienced lawyers quoted in the article describe triage of weak claims as an element of competent representation rather than its opposite. Wilder’s observation that “Being able to file Finley letters gave me the time to work on cases I could fix” describes a practice environment in which no-merit letters are a triage tool, not a constitutional deprivation. Tested against the available evidence, the investigation’s prior reporting found that about three-quarters of no-merit letters in Philadelphia were filed without meeting the client or obtaining discovery; what Wilder describes as triage and what the investigation documents as a pattern differ in their input prerequisites.

Third, the funding comparison reports state dollars at fifty-seven cents per capita against a roughly twenty-six-dollar average in neighboring states but does not break out combined state-and-local indigent-defense spending in either jurisdiction. The per-capita state figure understates the resource mismatch; even so, it does not by itself resolve the binding-constraint problem the mechanism identifies, because flat-fee contracting produces the same incentive structure regardless of total dollars.

Fourth, the available reform points are wider than the county-contract critique implies. The state Supreme Court sets procedural rules, and the August committee operates under court auspices. The investigation’s mechanism does not claim county contracts are the only reform point; it claims county contracts are a sufficient explanatory point for the documented pattern, which is consistent with reform addressing multiple components.

Fifth, and most serious, the North Carolina appellate-defender screening and the Maine workload standards the article cites sit inside indigent-defense offices with full-time staff and dedicated supervision. Importing their requirements into a Pennsylvania county-contract model without addressing whether Pennsylvania counties have the administrative capacity to operate them assumes away the implementation problem. The mechanism requires that whichever model is adopted address the four components the article documents; it does not require Maine’s or North Carolina’s exact model to be transplanted.

Boundary Conditions and Leading Indicators

The mechanism holds under specific boundary conditions: no contractual input requirement; no judicial deadlines; no qualification standard; no oversight. Introducing qualification requirements and oversight would alter the inputs lawyers must produce. Introducing case caps would alter the workload to which any input requirement applies. Introducing judicial deadlines would alter the corrective signal the structure can transmit.

The leading indicator that any reform has begun to fail is the same register as the cases the investigation documented: additional years of attorney inactivity, additional no-merit letters filed in matters where clients raised claims their lawyers had not investigated. Pennsylvania could test the mechanism’s predictions by tracking the distribution of days between appointment and first filing across all sixty-seven counties against the pre-reform baseline the investigation documents. A reform that addresses only the qualification component would predict an unchanged median appointment-to-filing day count even as the entry-bar rises, because the binding constraint sits in the funding, contracts, and judicial-practice components.

Evidentiary Gaps

The investigation documents approximately two hundred cases over fifteen years across sixty-seven counties; the universe of post-conviction matters that closed without documented delay is not supplied, and would resolve with data from the Pennsylvania courts or the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts on annual post-conviction filings and dispositions. The article cites North Carolina’s screening and Maine’s workload standards without reporting their outcome distributions. The August committee proposal date is inferred from the article’s publication context, with the substrate itself using only the month. The pending ACLU litigation is not separately tested against the reform pre-mortem. The article acknowledges that some delays reflect genuinely difficult investigative work: lawyers have spent years chasing down missing witnesses, litigating requests for DNA testing, or combing through police files. The funding comparison reports state dollars and does not aggregate county spending. The documented cases do not exclude a contributing role for individual conduct within the structural incentives.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Mechanism Understanding
Explains how something works — the parts and the process that turn inputs into outputs.
Pre-Mortem (Action Plan)
Imagines the plan has already failed, then works backward to find out why.
Red-Team Advocate
Argues the adversary’s case in full to expose what a plan underrates.