Opinion
2012-01-24
COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania, Petitioner v. Tyde PASTURE, Respondent.
Petition for Allowance of Appeal, No. 71 EAL 2011, from the Memorandum and Order of the Superior Court at No. 811 EDA 2009, 22 A.3d 1051, dated November 1, 2010 vacating the Judgment of Sentence of the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County at CP–51–CR–0200441–2001, dated February 12, 2009.
ORDER
PER CURIAM.
AND NOW, this 24th day of January, 2012, the Petition for Allowance of Appeal is hereby GRANTED, the order of the Superior Court VACATED, and the matter REMANDED to that court for consideration of the issue in light of Commonwealth v. Perry, 32 A.3d 232 (Pa.2011) (sentence can be overturned only if it results from manifest unreasonableness, partiality, bias, ill-will, or such lack of support so as to be clearly erroneous). Jurisdiction relinquished.
Justice SAYLOR files a Dissenting Statement.
Justice SAYLOR, dissenting.
But for limited instances in which this Court undertakes review of the Superior Court's legal determinations, see Commonwealth v. Walls, 592 Pa. 557, 926 A.2d 957, 961 (2007), the decision to disturb the intermediate court's resolution of discretionary sentencing challenges leaves the impression that this Court has disregarded the jurisdictional boundaries imposed by the General Assembly. See 42 Pa.C.S. § 9781(f). While I acknowledge that the majority of Justices did not share the similar concern that I expressed in Commonwealth v. Perry, 32 A.3d 232, 242–43 (Pa.2011) (Saylor, J., dissenting), the reliance on that case to vacate the Superior Court's order in the present matter only reinforces such impression. By their very nature, sentencing decisions are informed by the individual facts of each case, and this Court's inclination to summarily vitiate the Superior Court's reasonableness assessment of a sentence under a distinct factual paradigm, in my opinion, resembles a circumvention of the limitations of Section 9781(f).