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565 Pa. 1

771 A.2d 721

Commonwealth v. Morris

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Decided April 20, 2001

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania · decided 2001-04-20

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 2001-04-20

How this case has been cited

Cited by 55 later decisions — most recently September 2018 · most notably Payne v. Commonwealth Department of Corrections (2005), Commonwealth v. Jette (2011)

1 federal appellate · 52 state decisions

34020012010decided

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.

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FLAHERTY, Chief Justice,

¶1concurring.

¶2I join the opinion of the court, but wish to emphasize the inherent power of the court to enter a stay in order to effectuate justice. When the legislature is silent, a court can always enter a stay when it is necessary to avoid injustice.

¶3The opinion of the court briefly acknowledges this power, but understandably emphasizes the exception governing this case. When a convict under sentence of death seeks a stay of execution, he is obligated to follow the statutory procedure, set forth at 42 Pa.C.S. § 9545(c), established to control this precise situation. This in no way abrogates the court’s inherent power to grant a stay nor the convict’s right to seek a stay: it merely prescribes the procedure governing exercise of the court’s power and the convict’s rights. Mr. Justice Cap-pas opinion for the court aptly analogizes this situation to the relationship between the PCRA and the right of habeas corpus, whereby a petitioner must seek habeas relief only within the confines of the PCRA or suffer the loss of that right. This being understood, I join the opinion of the court.

¶4As appellant failed to follow the procedure of § 9545(c), I agree that the court lacked the authority to stay the execution.

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