A 67-year-old man in jail more than 50 years could go free after PA Supreme Court ruling.

PERKIOMEN VALLEY, PA — A state prisoner who had stabbed a fellow inmate in the head at the Graterford State Correctional Institution in Perkiomen Township more than 40 years ago may soon be leaving prison after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that that sentence could not stand after the U.S. Supreme Court previously ruled life sentences without parole given to juveniles were unconstitutional.

A divided state Supreme Court determined this week that the conviction that has kept James Henry Cobbs imprisoned could not stand because the underlying reason he was in prison in the first place – he participated in a murder-robbery as a teenager a half-century ago – was essentially vacated after U.S. Supreme Court justices ruled in 2012 that life sentences with no parole for juveniles violated the U.S. Constitution.

“The issue presented in this appeal … is whether Appellant James Henry Cobbs’ conviction of assault by a life prisoner is vitiated where a court subsequently vacated his predicate sentence of life imprisonment on grounds that it violated the Eight Amendment to the United States Constitution, and resentenced him on the underlying offense to a term of 40 years to lifetime incarceration,” the Aug. 17 Pennsylvania Supreme Court opinion reads. “We hold that under the circumstances presented, Appellant’s life sentence imposed for his conviction of assault by a life prisoner cannot stand.”

The Pennsylvania Superior Court had previously upheld the secondary conviction and sentence of Cobbs, so this decision by the high court essentially overturns that initial appellate ruling.

According to background information on the case, Cobbs was 17 years old when, on October 14, 1970, he and a 15-year-old accomplice engaged in a robbery during which James Brislin was stabbed to death in Allegheny County.

Cobbs was subsequently convicted of first-degree murder based on a theory of felony murder – when a defendant is committing a felony during which a murder takes place, even if an accomplice does the killing. In this case, the 15-year-old accomplice killed Brislin.

In May 1972, an Allegheny County Common Pleas Court judge sentenced Cobb to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

When Cobb was 25 years old back in December 1978, he stabbed a fellow inmate in the forehead during an altercation at the Graterford prison. A Montgomery County jury convicted Cobbs of assault by a life prisoner in 1979 and a judge sentenced him to a second term of life in prison without parole for that offense.

Cobbs subsequently appealed his original conviction and sentence in 2012, the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory life without parole for those under 18 years of age violated the prohibition of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ under the Eight Amendment.

The case took years to wind its way through the court system, the record shows. Finally, in 2017, an Allegheny County judge granted Cobbs’ request for post-conviction relief and scheduled a new sentencing hearing on the original first-degree murder conviction. At the hearing, state attorneys and Cobbs’ legal team agreed to a new sentence of 40 years to life with credit for time served, which at that point had already been 47 years behind bars.

Theoretically, Cobbs could have been released because of his time already served, however he remained imprisoned due to the second conviction stemming from the stabbing of the fellow Graterford inmate.

This week, the state Supreme Court determined that Cobbs should have been eligible for release after completing his more than four decades in prison stating that, “by recognizing the retroactive Eight Amendment prohibition on mandatory juvenile life without the possibility of parole sentences, Miller and Montgomery undermined the reliability of Appellant’s conviction and on his illegal mandatory life sentence imposed for a murder he committed while he was a juvenile.”

The high court above was referencing another case, Montgomery v. Louisiana, which piggybacked on the Miller case and declared that the ban on imposing mandatory life-without-parole sentences on juveniles applied retroactively.

Justices Kevin Dougherty and Sallie Mundy wrote a dissenting opinion on the case, essentially arguing, among other things, that the secondary conviction stemming from the prison attack occurred when Cobbs was an adult, not a juvenile as in the original crime, and that the Miller decision wouldn’t necessarily apply in that situation.

The 44-page majority opinion can be found here.