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Notes -
Digging into this is truly an eye glazing endeavor. How the fuck did lawyers do this before AI?
Anyways, it seems to be based on whether there was prosecutorial misconduct in the first trial, specifically if they committed a Brady violation by not turning over information from witness interviews that could be used to impugn their credibility. The specific details are really boring and technical.
It's not really surprising that the Philadelphia DA office, historically, did not keep its hands perfectly clean. And it is abstractly a good thing to check the work of one's predecessors. But this probably isn't the best use of their resources.
It's... uh, a bit worse than that. The PA Supreme Court brings up 11 people where the DA Office seems to knowingly provided false information to the courts in order to free serious criminals, mostly murderers and one armed robber, ranging from trying to bind the court to incorrect concessions (another case involving this very same guy) to concealing parallel state-federal operations (Antonio Martinez, this case again) or concealing or failing to recognize important facts of the case (Robert Wharton, Kevin Johnson), to just straight-up lying about the basic facts of the case (Dontia Patterson).
Given that the supposed 120 concessions of error, that the DAO has been caught trying to illegitimately free convicted criminals in at least 9% of concessions. Dissent quibbles that those cases had some overlap, so it's probably worse than that.
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