448 PA 502 - Commonwealth v. Yuknavich

How this case has been cited

Cited by 70 later decisions — most recently August 2020 · most notably Commonwealth v. Scott (1976), Commonwealth v. Sparrow (1977)

3 federal appellate · 67 state decisions

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

¶1Concurring Opinion by

Me. Justice Manderino :

¶2I concur in the result reached by the majority. I do not agree, however, that a defendant can be deprived of his right to trial by jury on the question of malice which is a necessary finding for the crime of murder— *512any murder. An irrebuttable presumption that malice is present in a felony-murder situation deprives tbe defendant of this right. If the jury is charged that they must find malice as a matter of law, because a felony was committed, the judge, and not the jury, has made a final determination on the key factual issue in a murder case.

¶3In this case there was no jury and if the guilty plea were valid, the defendant would have conceded the existence of malice and, therefore, the judge could properly have found first degree murder because the statutory law in Pennsylvania allows a finding of first degree murder when the murder was committed in the perpetration of armed robbery.

¶4I agree that the guilty plea was valid for the reasons stated in the Concurring Opinion of Mr. Justice Roberts in Commonwealth v. Godfrey, 434 Pa. 532, 254 A. 2d 923 (1969).