Court Opinion

ID: 9905548
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-11-29 17:11:22.319536+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:23:41.043743
License: Public Domain

J-S33003-23

NON-PRECEDENTIAL DECISION - SEE SUPERIOR COURT O.P. 65.37

  COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA                 :   IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF
                                               :        PENNSYLVANIA
                                               :
                v.                             :
                                               :
                                               :
  ANTONYO MONTEZ HARRIS                        :
                                               :
                       Appellant               :   No. 167 WDA 2023

           Appeal from the PCRA Order Entered November 7, 2022
    In the Court of Common Pleas of Venango County Criminal Division at
                      No(s): CP-61-CR-0000352-2016

BEFORE:      BENDER, P.J.E., McCAFFERY, J., and STEVENS, P.J.E.*

MEMORANDUM BY BENDER, P.J.E.:                  FILED: November 22, 2023

       Appellant, Antonyo Montez Harris, appeals pro se from the post-

conviction court’s November 7, 2022 order denying, as untimely, his petition

filed under the Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA), 42 Pa.C.S. §§ 9541-9546.

On appeal, Appellant claims that his discovery of a USA Today article detailing

alleged racial biases in sentencing in Blair County, Pennsylvania, constitutes

a ‘newly-discovered fact’ meeting the timeliness exception of 42 Pa.C.S. §

9545(b)(1)(ii).      After careful review, we disagree with Appellant and,

therefore, we affirm.

       The facts underlying Appellant’s convictions are not pertinent to our

disposition of his present appeal. We need only note that on November 30,

2016, Appellant pled guilty to one count of corrupt organizations, two counts

____________________________________________

* Former Justice specially assigned to the Superior Court.
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of delivery of a controlled substance, and one count of criminal use of a

communication facility.1        On February 7, 2017, he was sentenced to an

aggregate term of 93 months’ to 25 years’ incarceration. He did not file a

direct appeal and, thus, his judgment of sentence became final on March 7,

2017. See 42 Pa.C.S. § 9545(b)(3) (directing that a judgment of sentence

becomes final at the conclusion of direct review or the expiration of the time

for seeking the review); Pa.R.A.P. 903(a) (stating that a notice of appeal to

the Superior Court must be filed within 30 days after the entry of the order

from which the appeal is taken).

       Appellant thereafter filed a timely, pro se PCRA petition. After the court

appointed counsel, it ultimately denied Appellant’s petition and we affirmed

on appeal. See Commonwealth v. Harris, 200 A.3d 614 (Pa. Super. 2018)

(unpublished memorandum). Appellant filed a second, untimely PCRA petition

on February 13, 2019. Again, his petition was denied by the PCRA court, and

we affirmed on appeal. See Commonwealth v. Harris, 225 A.3d 1200 (Pa.

Super. 2019) (unpublished memorandum).

       On March 7, 2022, Appellant filed his third, pro se PCRA petition, which

underlies his present appeal. Therein, Appellant asserted, inter alia, a newly-

discovered-fact claim premised on a USA Today article, published on

December 15, 2021, entitled, “Why Must I Die in Prison?”             Essentially,

____________________________________________

1 18 Pa.C.S. § 911(b)(4), 35 P.S. § 780-113(a)(30), and 18 Pa.C.S. § 7512(a),

respectively.

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Appellant claimed that the article revealed to him that he was sentenced

disproportionately to his white cohorts based solely on the fact that he is black.

       The PCRA court issued a Pa.R.Crim.P. 907 notice of its intent to deny

Appellant’s petition without a hearing on the basis that it was untimely. In

regard to his newly-discovered-fact claim premised on the article, the court

found that Appellant “does not and cannot provide a link between the article

and the facts and circumstances of this particular case to prove that

discriminatory trends affected his sentencing.” Rule 907 Notice, 8/4/22, at 4

(unnumbered).       On November 7, 2022, the court issued an order denying

Appellant’s petition.

       Appellant filed a pro se notice of appeal that was docketed in the trial

court on February 7, 2023.2 Herein, Appellant states one issue for our review,

which we reproduce verbatim:

____________________________________________

2 Pennsylvania Rule of Appellate Procedure 903(a) requires appellants to file

notices of appeal within thirty days after the entry of the order from which the
appeal is taken. See also Commonwealth v. Valentine, 928 A.2d 346, 349
(Pa. Super. 2007) (applying the thirty-day rule). However, Pa.R.A.P. 121(f),
titled “Date of filing for incarcerated persons,” provides:

       A pro se filing submitted by a person incarcerated in a correctional
       facility is deemed filed as of the date of the prison postmark or
       the date the filing was delivered to the prison authorities for
       purposes of mailing as documented by a properly executed
       prisoner cash slip or other reasonably verifiable evidence.

Pa.R.A.P. 121(f); see also Commonwealth v. Jones, 700 A.2d 423 (Pa.
1997) (concluding that pro se prisoners’ appeals must be deemed filed as of
the date they deliver them to prison authorities for mailing). Here, Appellant
(Footnote Continued Next Page)

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       1) Did the lower court err and abused its discretion in dismissing
       Appellant’s pro se PCRA petition as untimely when he adequately
       and diligently presented newly discovered evidence of judicial bias
       of sentencing Judge Boyer for engaging in unconstitutional racial
       discrimination by improperly aggregating his sentence in this
       matter merely because he is an African American?

Appellant’s Brief at 4.

       This Court’s standard of review regarding an order denying a petition

under the PCRA is whether the determination of the PCRA court is supported

by the evidence of record and is free of legal error.       Commonwealth v.

Ragan, 923 A.2d 1169, 1170 (Pa. 2007). We must begin by addressing the

timeliness of Appellant’s petition, because the PCRA time limitations implicate

our jurisdiction and may not be altered or disregarded in order to address the

merits of a petition. See Commonwealth v. Bennett, 930 A.2d 1264, 1267

(Pa. 2007). Under the PCRA, any petition for post-conviction relief, including

a second or subsequent one, must be filed within one year of the date the

judgment of sentence becomes final, unless one of the following exceptions

set forth in 42 Pa.C.S. § 9545(b)(1)(i)-(iii) applies:

       (b) Time for filing petition.--

          (1) Any petition under this subchapter, including a second
          or subsequent petition, shall be filed within one year of the
          date the judgment becomes final, unless the petition alleges
          and the petitioner proves that:

              (i) the failure to raise the claim previously was the
              result of interference by government officials with the
____________________________________________

attached a cash slip to his notice of appeal that is dated November 26, 2022,
indicating that his notice of appeal was processed by the jail on November 29,
2022. Thus, applying Rule 121(f), Appellant’s notice of appeal may be deemed
timely filed.

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              presentation of the claim in violation of the
              Constitution or laws of this Commonwealth or the
              Constitution or laws of the United States;

              (ii) the facts upon which the claim is predicated were
              unknown to the petitioner and could not have been
              ascertained by the exercise of due diligence; or

              (iii) the right asserted is a constitutional right that was
              recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States
              or the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania after the time
              period provided in this section and has been held by
              that court to apply retroactively.

42 Pa.C.S. § 9545(b)(1)(i)-(iii). Additionally, section 9545(b)(2) requires that

any petition attempting to invoke one of these exceptions “be filed within one

year of the date the claim could have been presented.”                42 Pa.C.S. §

9545(b)(2).

       In this case, Appellant’s judgment of sentence became final in March of

2017 and, thus, his present petition filed in 2022 is patently untimely.

Consequently, for this Court to have jurisdiction to review the merits thereof,

Appellant must prove that he meets one of the exceptions to the timeliness

requirements set forth in 42 Pa.C.S. § 9545(b). In this vein, Appellant argues

that   he   meets     the   after-discovered    evidence    exception       of   section

9545(b)(1)(ii) based on the USA Today article. According to Appellant, that

article, which he attached to his appellate brief, states, in pertinent part:

       Black people in Blair County sentenced for the same drug
       trafficking crime were roughly 18 times more likely to be sent to
       state prison, where longer sentences are typically served, than
       white people, according to a USA Today analysis of 2018 data from
       the state’s sentencing commission. Statewide, that disparity is
       five times[.]

Appellant’s Brief at 8-9 (citation omitted).

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      Appellant challenges the PCRA court’s conclusion that he offered no link

between the information in the article and his case, insisting that he has

demonstrated “that said discriminatory trends affected his sentence.” Id. at

10. Specifically, Appellant avers that,
      [f]rom the onset of this prosecution, the Commonwealth
      presented a theory of the case that codefendant Calvin Ludy was
      the leader of the corrupt organization with Appellant and several
      other codefendants playing a substantial role therein. However,
      Appellant was sentenced to almost double the amount of time of
      incarceration than Mr. Ludy[,]1 and almost five times the amount
      of time of incarceration than all white codefendants in this matter.
         1 Mr. Ludy received a sentence of four (4) to eight (8) years

         of incarceration.

Id. (unnecessary capitalization omitted). Appellant claims that these facts,

which he stated in his petition, were sufficient to establish a link between the

information contained in the article and Appellant’s specific case, so as to

warrant the court’s considering the merits of his claim.

      After carefully considering Appellant’s argument, we conclude that no

relief is due. We find Commonwealth v. Chmiel, 173 A.3d 617 (Pa. 2017),

instructive. There, our Supreme Court held that an FBI press release, and the

attendant admissions by the FBI contained therein, constituted a newly-

discovered fact for    purposes    of triggering   the     exception   of section

9545(b)(1)(ii). Id. at 629. Inherent in both the FBI press release, and a

subsequent Washington Post article publicizing it, were the facts that (1) “the

FBI publicly admitted that the testimony and statements provided by its

analysts about microscopic hair comparison analysis were erroneous in the

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vast majority of cases[,]” and (2) “the FBI had trained many state and local

analysts to provide the same scientifically flawed opinions in state criminal

trials.” Id. at 625. Our Supreme Court concluded that it was not the source

of the facts, i.e., a press release or a newspaper article, that satisfied the

newly-discovered facts exception but, rather, it was the information contained

in those media sources which satisfied the exception. Id. at 628. In other

words, facts are not what a reader gleans from media reports or newspaper

articles but, instead, facts are the substantive events, i.e., the FBI’s admission

of error, which prompted the report by the media. See Commonwealth v.

Castro, 93 A.3d 818, 825 n.11 (Pa. 2014) (reiterating that “[facts] cannot

consist of what one hears on the news”) (citation omitted); see also

Commonwealth v. Reid, 235 A.3d 1124, 1146 (Pa. 2020) (holding, a judicial

decision is not a fact to support the newly-discovered facts exception because

“an in-court ruling or published judicial opinion is law[;] it is simply the

embodiment of abstract principles applied to actual events. The events that

prompted the analysis, which must be established by presumption or

evidence, are regarded as fact.”).

      Here, unlike the FBI press release in Chmiel, the USA Today article

contains no admissions of biased practices in sentencing. Instead, the author

of the article speculates that racial bias in sentencing likely exists in Blair

County, and possibly statewide, based on generalized statistics, as well as a

sentence imposed by a different judge, in a different county, 17 years before

Appellant’s sentence was imposed. Statistics are not substantive events, and

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a sentence imposed in a wholly unrelated case, by a different judge in a

different county, is not sufficiently linked to Appellant’s case so as to constitute

a   newly-discovered     fact   under   the   timeliness     exception    of   section

9545(b)(1)(ii).

      We also observe that Appellant’s claim is grounded in the fact that he

was     allegedly       sentenced       disproportionately      to       his    white

codefendants/coconspirators. However, this alleged disparity existed from the

moment the sentences were imposed, not from the date that the USA Today

article was published.    Appellant does not claim that, prior to the article’s

publication, he was unaware — or could not have discovered earlier, in the

exercise of due diligence — that he received a sentence ‘dramatically higher’

than any of his white cohorts. Furthermore, the information in the USA Today

article was premised on 2018 data from the sentencing commission. Appellant

fails to explain why he could not have also discovered this 2018 data earlier

than 2021 when the article was published, and challenged his sentence, on

the basis that the court was racially biased, in litigating his first or second

PCRA petitions in 2018 and 2019.

      For all of these reasons, we discern no error in the PCRA court’s

conclusion that Appellant failed to prove the applicability of the newly-

discovered-fact exception of section 9545(b)(1)(ii). Therefore, we affirm the

order dismissing his untimely petition.

      Order affirmed.

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DATE: 11/22/2023

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