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576 Pa. 385

839 A.2d 277

Nixon v. Commonwealth

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Decided December 30, 2003

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania · decided 2003-12-30

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“Here, it is clear that no such real and substantial relationship exists. If the goal of the criminal records chapter is, as the Commonwealth Parties allege, to protect the Commonwealth’s vulnerable citizens from those deemed incapable of safely providing for them, there was simply no basis to distinguish caretakers with convictions who had been fortunate enough to hold a single job since July 1, 1997, i.e., a year before the effective date of the chapter, from those who may have successfully worked in the industry for more than a year but had not held one continuous job in a covered facility since July 1,1997. The only conceivable explanation for the distinction between individuals who had completed a one year tenure in a covered facility and those who had previously had successful tenures in covered facilities, but had not been at one facility since July 1, 1997, is that the General Assembly determined that those persons convicted of the disqualifying crimes who had been working at a covered facility for more than a year presented less of a risk because they had proven that they were not likely to harm the patient population and had established a degree of trust with their patients and management. However, if convicted criminals who had been working at a covered facility for more than a year as of July 1, 1998, were capable of essentially rehabilitating themselves so as to qualify them to continue working in a covered facility, there should be no reason why other convicted c”

quoted by 1 later decision, including Warren County Human Services v. State Civil Service Commission

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 2003-12-30

How this case has been cited

Cited by 61 later decisions — most recently July 2024 · most notably In the Interest of J.B. (2014), Hiller v. Fausey (2006)

2 federal appellate · 51 state decisions

330200320102020decided

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

¶1*406CONCURRING OPINION

Chief Justice CAPPY.

¶2I concur in the result reached by the majority. As the equal protection approach taken by the majority was not discussed by the Appellees before our Court or raised in the filings below,11 do not believe that we should strike down the subject statute as unconstitutional on this basis.

¶3I do believe, however, that the statute is infirm on the basis articulated by Mr. Justice Castille in his concurring opinion— that is, the lifetime ban on employment has no rational relationship to the legitimate goal of protecting our older adults from harm. As stated by Appellees, “[I]t is not as if the General Assembly made a reasoned but imperfect attempt to draw a line at some rational point; rather, it chose not to draw any line in favor of an outright, permanent, and absolute ban.” Appellees’ Brief at 31. It is this absolute ban that renders the statute constitutionally defective. Thus, I join that portion of Mr. Justice Castille’s concurring opinion that would affirm the Commonwealth Court on this basis.

Justice NEWMAN joins this concurring opinion.

¶4. Specifically, the grounds on which the majority bases its approach were not raised by Appellees in their original Petition for Review, the Petition for Preliminary Injunction, or the Memorandum of Law submitted therewith. While mention of this argument was orally made in the hearing before Judge Dan Pellegrini regarding the Petition for Preliminary Injunction, Transcript of Proceedings, August 31, 2000, p. 8, it was not thereafter raised in the briefs to our Court. Thus, I do not believe that our Court should strike a statute on a basis that was not urged by the complaining parties. Furthermore, the General Assembly could simply eliminate the distinction that leads the majority to find the statute unconstitutional by applying the prohibition on employment to all employees and not just those who have not held a continuous job in a covered facility since July 1, 1997.. As set forth herein, I believe that there is a more fundamental infirmity with the statute that would lead us to conclude that the statute is unconstitutional, and one that was clearly raised by Appellees.

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