Hundreds of appeals exposed failures by judges to supervise appointed lawyers
A ProPublica investigation found that Pennsylvania judges repeatedly failed to intervene when court-appointed post-conviction lawyers abandoned clients. The investigation was co-published with The Philadelphia Inquirer and produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the newspaper. A reporter who has spent years covering criminal justice in Pennsylvania, including the post-conviction system, began the yearlong inquiry after sitting as the lone spectator in Judge Frank Palumbo’s Philadelphia courtroom on a morning in July 2025, watching prosecutors and public defenders haggle over defendants’ fates. The reporter said the scene left them wondering how the observed practice squared with Pennsylvania’s promise of effective legal representation. During the review, the reporter read hundreds of Finley letters, tracked down court financial records from all 67 Pennsylvania counties, interviewed dozens of lawyers and analyzed thousands of court dockets. Aaron Brezel of ProPublica contributed reporting.
Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act allows a person to argue that their lawyer had mishandled their case or to raise newly discovered evidence. A Finley letter is the no-merit brief in which an appointed lawyer argues that the client’s claims lack merit and asks to withdraw. The state Supreme Court says a judge must conduct a review of the merits when an appointed lawyer submits such a letter. The law does not require an appointed lawyer to speak with the client, contact the trial lawyer or obtain available police files before deciding the claims are meritless. Dozens of lawyers interviewed by ProPublica expressed sharply divided opinions about the extent of their obligations to these clients.
Court-appointed post-conviction lawyers do not work unsupervised. Judges are largely responsible for appointing them and are supposed to ensure that their work is timely and diligent. ProPublica attributed compromised representation to lax rules, low pay and heavy caseloads. In reporting over the past year, it documented lawyers working under fee structures banned in other states falling years behind on their cases, prisoners waiting nearly a decade for a lawyer to file anything and others whose lawyers filed Finley letters despite compelling evidence of innocence. Looking at three years of invoices, ProPublica found that, three quarters of the time, Philadelphia lawyers who wrote Finley letters had never spoken with their clients, contacted the trial lawyer or obtained available police files before deciding their claims had no merit.
ProPublica found that judges continued to assign lawyers more cases even after appeals courts flagged serious issues with their work. Over the three years of cases it reviewed, judges accepted almost all Finley letters despite the lawyers’ minimal investigative efforts. Some of the letters they approved contained obvious factual errors or even named the wrong client.
To evaluate lower-court judges, the reporter used the rulings of Pennsylvania’s Superior Court, the state’s appeals court that hears hundreds of challenges to judges’ rulings on post-conviction matters each year. After logging hundreds of rebukes laid out in Superior Court opinions by hand, the reporter asked colleagues with data skills to identify as many of those cases as possible across the last 14 years, the time frame for which opinions were reliably posted online.
The review identified more than 250 cases in which judges did not intervene as appointed lawyers provided what the court labeled ineffective representation: “sandbagging” a client at a hearing, stonewalling a petitioner who had mailed two dozen letters to the lawyer’s office or filing boilerplate appeals so vague they doomed the clients’ cases. In hundreds more cases, judges failed to appoint a lawyer at all, held hearings in which petitioners went unrepresented or allowed a lawyer to drop a case and leave a client stranded on appeal. More than 200 times, judges oversaw lawyers who abandoned clients, tanked their appeals or stalled their cases for years. One Superior Court opinion bemoaned an “embarrassing saga” of deficient lawyering that a Berks County judge had tolerated. Another criticized a Philadelphia judge and five attorneys she had appointed who all missed appeal deadlines, writing, “As Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel said of the hapless 1962 New York Mets, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’” Marissa Boyers Bluestine, a longtime post-conviction lawyer now at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, said, “Judges are in a terrific position to be able to prevent these kinds of injustices.”
The Superior Court affirms about 80% of lower-court rulings. ProPublica said that rate is expected because of strict deadlines, complicated rules for filing appeals and the court’s obligation to defer to lower-court factual findings. When it reverses an error, the usual recourse is to order a do-over or, on rare occasions, tell the lower court to explore sanctions. In one opinion, the court used boldface to state, “The PCRA court did nothing in this case for 20 years,” and then told the lower court to try again.
Judges have the authority and, under state rules, an obligation to make disciplinary referrals. Complaints are confidential, so ProPublica said the frequency of referrals cannot be known. Only six lawyers in the last decade have been publicly sanctioned for work on court-appointed post-conviction cases. No lower-court judge in at least a decade has been publicly disciplined for mishandling a post-trial matter. Judges who, according to the Superior Court, exhibited biases, imposed vindictive sentences or improperly denied recusal requests remained on the bench. Even after the appeals court raised alarms, more than 100 cases moved between the appeals court and county judges two, three, four or more times, as judges repeated errors or reappointed lawyers to cases they had already mishandled.
In the July 2025 courtroom sequence, Palumbo paused the proceedings to talk to a lawyer he had appointed to help a prisoner who had challenged his conviction. The lawyer profusely thanked the judge for the job. Palumbo offered guidance: “I think I know where this is going to go. I don’t want to make it overly complicated. It’s real simple.” He said he would pass along a brief that a different lawyer had filed arguing there was no merit to the man’s claims in a related case. “I’m not saying plagiarize,” Palumbo said. The attorney told the judge he got the message: “So it’s called a Finley letter,” he said, using the legal term for a no-merit brief in which an attorney argues against a client’s claims and asks to withdraw. After more discussion, Palumbo agreed: “It’s looking like it’s going to be a Finley dismissal,” he said, “but every option is open.” Last fall, after Palumbo gave the lawyer a copy of a Finley letter, the lawyer followed the template. His no-merit brief said that his client’s claim could not be considered because he had missed his filing deadline, and the bulk of the document was identical to the other lawyer’s brief. Palumbo, who did not respond to requests for comment, accepted the Finley letter anyway, let the lawyer drop the client and dismissed the claim.
One case that moved repeatedly between the courts followed a sentence imposed by John Foradora, Jefferson County’s only judge. Foradora sentenced a woman to up to 22 years in prison for passing two narcotics pills in prison, and her lawyer failed to object to or appeal the lengthy sentence. After she filed a PCRA petition, the Superior Court found that her lawyers’ inaction enabled what the court called “unduly harsh and clearly unreasonable” punishment to stand. Each time the appeals court reversed the decision, Foradora imposed another lengthy term. After three reversals, the woman had served more than eight years. Foradora said through a court spokesperson that he was unable to comment. Shannon McDonald, an attorney in the Philadelphia suburbs, said “some judges don’t consider PCRA a priority.” She described a petition languishing on a Delaware County judge’s desk for two years, until her client had finished his sentence and been released from prison. The judge then ruled, dismissing the claim.
ProPublica found hundreds of cases in which the Superior Court overruled lower-court judges who accepted flawed Finley letters. The appeals court noted that lawyers incorrectly claimed that clients had missed filing deadlines, rejected legitimate claims as meritless or failed to notice that clients were serving illegal sentences. In dozens of cases, judges approved defective letters that did not fulfill basic rules, such as including notification to the client or addressing all the claims the client wanted to raise.
Several judges told ProPublica that Finley letters serve an important purpose by shutting down frivolous challenges that waste resources. “Not all [claims] have merit,” Judge John J. Mead of Erie said. “A lot of them initially you could look at and make a determination [as to] whether or not it’s going to require a hearing.” Rob Perkins, who leads the nonprofit Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice, said he has encountered some judges who take post-conviction matters seriously while others seem to view them as a nuisance. He said several lawyers told him they feared that if they litigated cases too aggressively, judges would withhold future assignments. The no-merit letter becomes the simplest path forward, he said: “When a judge is handed a no-merit letter that sounds good, I think their inclination is to accept that the attorney did their job.”
ProPublica found that the system makes accepting a Finley letter the simplest choice for a judge. A judge who rejects one must either find a new lawyer willing to take the case or force the same lawyer to pursue a matter the lawyer previously deemed meritless. The Superior Court warned that the latter course could pit a lawyer against his client; in one recent case, the court found that the approach denied a man’s right to counsel. The lawyer, forced to handle a hearing after writing a Finley letter, treated it “more like a cross-examination of a witness that [he] does not believe than a direct examination of his client.” Jon Auritt, who retired after more than 50 years as a lawyer in Delaware County, attributed the failures to appointed lawyers’ dependence on the local judges who appoint them. Even if judges were not as explicit as Palumbo was with their instructions, Auritt said, their message was often clear: “The judges are never incentivized to appoint a lawyer who might earnestly find a reason to overturn the conviction.”
To identify cases in which Pennsylvania appeals court judges reversed or vacated lower-court rulings on Post Conviction Relief Act cases, ProPublica compiled about 19,000 opinions published on the Pennsylvania Superior Court website from 2011 through July 2026. The documents were identified through a keyword search for “PCRA.” ProPublica used artificial intelligence to identify cases in which the appeals court took issue with judges’ errors and lawyers’ failings in lower-court proceedings. It first read and classified about 500 of the 19,000 opinions, tested multiple artificial-intelligence prompts against those 500 classifications and ran the prompt with the best results against the remaining documents. Every classification was checked against an artificial-intelligence-written summary of the opinion or the opinion itself. ProPublica also manually checked a random sample of 50 summaries to confirm that the technology accurately summarized the corresponding opinions.
The yearlong review grew from the reporter’s question after watching Palumbo’s courtroom: why has it become the norm for Pennsylvania’s lawyers to argue against their own clients, and who is this system serving?