The Pennsylvania Supreme Court announced Friday that it will hear an appeal from Derek Lee, a man convicted of second-degree murder who is challenging the state’s law requiring mandatory life prison sentences for those found guilty of the offense who did not intend to kill.

The court granted Lee’s petition for an appeal on the issues of whether Lee’s mandatory life sentence violates Article I §13 of the Pennsylvania Constitution and the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution. Article I §13 of the Pennsylvania Constitution prohibits “cruel punishments” and the Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Quinn Cozzens, a staff attorney with the Abolitionist Law Center, the organization representing Lee, celebrated the announcement, stating:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s acceptance of Derek Lee’s appeal is a major opportunity for Derek and thousands of others in his position to begin rolling back these excessive and harmful sentencing practices. As one of the world’s leaders in sentencing people to die in prison, it is long past time for Pennsylvania to join many other states in the U.S. and almost every country in the world in recognizing that people convicted of felony murder should not face death-by-incarceration sentences.

Lee was convicted of second-degree murder in 2014 for participating in a robbery that led to the death of the victim. Lee did not kill the victim himself; however, second-degree or felony murder only requires that someone commit a felony that leads to the death of another in order to be convicted, even if they are not directly responsible for the death. The judge in Lee’s case was statutorily required to sentence Lee to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Lee appealed his sentence to the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, which upheld his sentence in 2023. Lee then asked the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to hear his appeal.

Mandatory sentencing has been an issue of great concern in the US as the number of people in prison has grown sharply over the last few decades. According to the US Sentencing Commission, in fiscal year 2022, 29.6 percent of all federal criminal cases included mandatory minimum sentencing, which requires those convicted of a crime to be sentenced to no less than a statutorily directed minimum. 28.1 percent of those sentenced under mandatory minimums identified as Black, a disproportionate representation as compared to only 14.4 percent of the wider US population who identify as Black. A 38.5 percent plurality of those charged federally under mandatory minimum policies were Hispanic, with only 19 percent of the wider US population identifying as Hispanic.