A specter of justice in Pennsylvania

Big, ringing, deep—it’s the kind of laugh that fills a room, dripping with genuine warmth. “It’s that laugh from within your soul,” his mother, Lorraine Haw — or Mrs. Dee Dee to all who know her — tells me. “He’s never lost himself, that human side of him, the part that brings joy to everyone around.”

In his circumstances, most others would have lost that human side. Ocampo has been incarcerated in Pennsylvania’s prison system since 1994, when he was 18 years old. Now 50, he is one of 1,131 people serving life sentences for felony murder in the state. For much of his life, he said, he thought there was no hope.

But that may be about to change. 

Two months after his 18th birthday, Ocampo was charged with second-degree felony murder under state law, which guarantees a life sentence without the possibility of parole. A centuries-old legal doctrine, felony murder holds all participants in a felony crime, like a robbery or burglary, accountable for any death that occurs during that crime—even if they did not personally pull the trigger or have any intent to kill. 

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Nationally, only 11 states mandate life without parole sentences for those convicted of felony murder. Until this spring, Pennsylvania was one of them. In 2022, one-quarter of people serving life without parole sentences in Pennsylvania prisons were doing so under the felony murder rule — over 1,000 people. 

On March 26, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in Commonwealth v. Lee that mandatory life without parole sentencing for felony murder constitutes “cruel punishment” in violation of the state constitution. The holding means that future felony murder cases in Pennsylvania may be treated with more leniency in sentencing.

But the question of retroactive justice — resentencing for those serving life without parole sentences handed down before the ruling — remains unanswered. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court punted the implementation of its ruling to the state legislature, issuing a 120-day “waiting period” during which the legislature could determine how the promises of Lee would apply to those already serving time for felony murder. 

On June 23rd, the GOP-led state Senate passed a bill that would impose a minimum 35-year sentence in nearly all cases of felony murder. SB1400 stipulates that only in a sliver of cases — that meet a strict set of requirements — could shorter sentences of 10 to 40 years be dispensed. But the bill has not passed the Democratic-led House. Democrats like Tim Briggs, who chairs the House’s Judiciary Committee, say they cannot support the Senate’s plan because it includes a high mandatory minimum sentence rather than giving judges discretion in sentencing. “I haven’t voted for any mandatory minimum [sentences] in 16 years,” Briggs told the Capital-Star.

“We remain committed to trying to negotiate,” said Elizabeth Rementer, spokesperson for Democratic majority leader Matt Bradford. “But unfortunately, this (SB1400) isn’t it.” 

In a press release by the Pennsylvania GOP on July 21st, Senator Tracy Pennycuick (R-24) said that there “are 1,100 victims that are no longer with us today in Pennsylvania because of these murderers.” 

“Those convicted of one of the most heinous acts should not have access to a potential loophole that would put them back on our streets,” added Rep. Kristin Marcell (R-178).

But advocates emphasize that the Lee decision only affects those convicted of felony murder – meaning they participated in a felony that led to death – not those convicted of first-degree, or intentional, murder.

One day remains for the legislature to come to a compromise on the bill before the Supreme Court’s waiting period expires. On Tuesday, a press release from the Pennsylvania GOP highlighted that party members such as Sen. Frank Farry are urging “immediate legislative action” to reach a compromise. On Wednesday, the House convened for a non-voting session to debate the court’s ruling in Lee. Nicole Reigelman, the press secretary for the Speaker of the House, said in a statement that “no legislative solution will be negotiated,” though the House will convene for a voting session today to “act on this issue.”

If a measure is not passed by Friday, the courts will have to decide whether, and how, to resentence the over 1,100 people currently serving life sentences on felony murder charges — without legislative input. 

“If no action is taken, Lee will be sentenced to the Allegheny Court of Common Pleas,” Reigelman added in the statement. “We will continue to rely on the sound judgment of courts across this commonwealth to impose just sentences.”

The Public Defender Association said in a statement that SB1400 “replicates the mistakes of Pennsylvania’s current, unconstitutional sentencing scheme with high mandatory sentences that provide narrow opportunity for relief,” and could cost between $34 million and $36 million to ensure adequate representation for all involved. 

The Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association said in a July 15 press release that a legislative solution like SB1400 would protect against the burden of resentencing falling upon district attorneys and public defenders, citing the alternative, court-based approach as an “overwhelming burden to taxpayers.” 

No matter what pathway becomes the way forward, resentencing “will not be immediate,” said Bret Grote, legal director of the Abolitionist Law Center, and the process certainly won’t result in all people incarcerated for felony murder being released instantly. Still, the review of their cases could be the largest resentencing effort in the history of the commonwealth.

“When I found out [about Lee], I cried,” Haw, Ocampo’s mother, said. “I cried so much that day, I didn’t think I’d be able to open my eyes… I just kept thinking, my baby might be coming home.”

A product of poverty

A good life in inner-city Philadelphia in the 1990s was defined by three things, Phillip Ocampo tells me: drugs, cash, and girls.

Ocampo was born in 1976 in south Philadelphia. From a young age, his mother struggled with a drug addiction that threatened to upend their home life. When he was seven years old, Ocampo moved in with his grandmother. He had “no male role models,” he said—so the boys on the block became his heroes.

As he entered his early teens, he traded in his baseball glove for packs of cigarettes, his weekends at the arcade for nights partying at local clubs. “I hate to explain away my circumstances, but I really was a product of poverty,” Ocampo told me over the phone from State Correctional Institution (SCI) Coal Township, which is located in rural Northumberland County – some 123 miles away from Philly. It’s been his home since 2022. Before that, he spent 28 years at SCI Smithfield, 200 miles west in Huntingdon County.

In an interview from prison,  Ocampo tells me about that day — the one that changed his life — slowly, his voice thin and reedy. On a hot afternoon, two months after he turned 18, Philip’s friends offered him a chance to score some quick cash: rob a drug dealer’s house in the neighborhood when he wasn’t home. Speed in, speed out. Ocampo was in.

At the time, he was about to graduate high school. He was dating a girl and had two kids: one-year-old Ziany and two-month-old Delilah. Life was “rough around the edges,” he said, but it was good — he had a family who loved him and a community in the city. He just needed cash, he said, to help him support his kids, along with several older family members who were living with him.

According to case records, Ocampo and two friends, John Spaddy and Corey Jones, devised a plan: break into Gilberto Torres’ home, grab some cash, and leave. In March 1994, they put the plan into action. At first, Ocampo recalled, the process was seamless; they got past the door and immediately started looking around for cash. But, a few minutes later, Torres arrived home accompanied by his nephew, a cousin, and a friend.

Shocked, Spaddy and Ocampo ducked into a vacant front room to hide. Then, Spaddy opened fire. His bullets seriously injured one man and killed another. (The Capital-Star was not able to identify these victims in court documents.)

Ocampo didn’t shoot the gun, nor did he intend to participate in the killing, but for his participation in the robbery that led to that death, he was charged with second-degree felony murder. 

The robbery, Ocampo later reflected, was “a choice I had made and that I took responsibility for.” But at 18, he never imagined how the incident would snowball: the death of a fellow human being, the weight of its guilt on his conscience, a lifetime behind bars. 

The impact of that life sentence rippled through Ocampo’s family and community. 

For Haw, his mother, Ocampo’s case led to a “reckoning” with the justice system, she said. 

Years before, Haw’s younger brother had been murdered by a teenager around the same age as Ocampo.  “I was so full of hatred and anger then,” she remembered. “I just wanted that man, the man who killed my brother, to hurt.”

“Lo and behold, several years down the road, here comes my son getting incarcerated,” she said. “And I realized really then, how can I sit here and ask someone to forgive my son if I wasn’t able to forgive someone else’s son?” 

Her decision to forgive “felt like a thousand elephants were lifted” from her chest.

The day Ocampo was sentenced to life in prison, Haw made a decision: to get clean and fight for justice for her son. “I did it for God and for my baby,” she said. She started going to classes at a local community college to learn about the criminal justice system and became involved with two local legal organizations, Amistad Law Project and the Abolitionist Law Center. 

She even befriended Betty Lee, the mother of Derek Lee, whose case was at the center of the March Supreme Court ruling that struck down mandatory life without parole sentences for felony murder. Betty, Haw said, helped her understand how felony murder was impacting so many families beyond her own.

“Mrs. Dee Dee has poured so much into bringing Phillip home,” Jules Rodgers, an organizer with the Amistad Law Project, told me. “It just shows how much this stuff ripples, you know, ripples to family, to your community.”

When Ocampo was young, Haw remembers, her relationship with him was shaped by the volatility of her addiction. But since then, their  relationship has evolved in a “beautiful” way, she told me. She and Ocampo write each other notes often, playing Tic Tac Toe across time and space on the prison’s cardstock paper. They never go a day without checking in on the phone—Haw said that if they were to miss a morning, “Phillip knows I’d go crazy.”

“My mom, she’s my rock, she knows everything about this situation and about getting me out,” Ocampo said. “And, it’s just… I just want to go home to her, my grandkids.” 

Disproportionately charged

Felony murder is a widely-used legal hammer, said Bret Grote, legal director at the Abolitionist Law Center in Pennsylvania. Its basic premise is that, by partaking in a felony, a person assumes responsibility for any death that may result. Across the country, this legal doctrine has been used to imprison people in a wide range of circumstances, from Ryan Holle lending a car to someone committing a felony, to LaChanté Mobley trusting her fiancé to care for her young son, to Phillip Ocampo aiding a robbery that ended in an unintentional killing. 

The impact of felony murder is disparate. Black people are disproportionately charged with felony murder, Caitlin Glass, the director of the Racial Justice and Movement Lawyering Clinic at Boston University, told me. That fact is especially true in Pennsylvania, where, according to the Felony Murder Reporting Project, Black people are over 17 times more likely to be imprisoned for felony murder than their white counterparts. Of those serving time for felony murder in Pennsylvania prisons in 2020, 80% were people of color and 70% were African American, according to the Sentencing Project. 

Young people are also disproportionately prosecuted for felony murder. In Pennsylvania, people convicted of felony murder are eight years younger on average at the time of admission to prison than those convicted of other crimes, according to the Felony Murder Reporting Project.

The Lee decision offers a sense of hope to those incarcerated under felony murder in the state — and a path forward against “death by incarceration,” the term organizers use to describe the sentence of life in prison without parole. 

Derek Lee, the appellant in Commonwealth v. Lee, was charged with felony murder in 2014 for participating in a robbery during which a co-perpetrator shot and killed a man, Leonard Butler. The murder took place in the basement, while Lee was upstairs. 

Ten years later, in October of 2024, he challenged his life without parole sentence before the commonwealth’s highest court, arguing that it was unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” and the state constitution’s limitations on “cruel punishment.”

Ultimately, the court’s decision relied on Pennsylvania’s specific “cruel punishment” clause, not the federal Eighth Amendment. Grote, of the Abolitionist Law Center, hopes the case serves as a model for other legal challenges based on state constitutions across the country.

“We’re going to be proactively looking to disseminate lessons and strategies and ways that others can apply what happened here to their own locale,” Grote said. “This can and should serve as a model to be adapted to local conditions.”

In Michigan, for example, a case is currently pending that could abolish life without parole sentences for felony murder. Litigators there have been looking to Lee, for inspiration, Grote said.

Lee has also offered hope to those incarcerated for felony murder in other states. Billy Hinson, who’s serving a life sentence for felony murder at Avon Park Correctional Institution in Tampa Bay, Florida, said that “what happened in Pennsylvania gave us all of us in here hope.” 

Before Lee, the only way out of life without parole in Pennsylvania was by a sentence commutation granted by the governor’s office. Between 1999 and 2018, only 10 commutations were granted to people serving life sentences. In 2019, Governor Tom Wolf issued 19 in a flurry of clemency grants for older individuals who had spent lifetimes in prison. 

From 2020 to 2026, there were 51 commutations in all. Despite that uptick, those receiving clemency still only constituted 4.5% of those imprisoned with life without parole sentences in Pennsylvania’s prisons. 

That means Lee could be “truly revolutionary” in curbing “death by incarceration” in Pennsylvania, said Rodgers, of the Amistad Law Project. 

“This ruling carries so much hope,” they said. “But it’s just all in the hands of the state legislature to grant it.”

A light at the end of the tunnel

At SCI Coal Township, Ocampo hasn’t let his circumstances dampen his efforts at rehabilitation. He cares deeply about mental health issues and has committed much of his time in prison to working with those who are mentally ill. 

“He’ll push these men on their wheelchairs and just try his best to make them laugh,” Haw told me. 

He volunteered to be a porter, helping to clean up cells and maintain hygienic living conditions. He serves as the treasurer of the Lifers’ Group, a group of advocates within the prison system who have life sentences. Most recently, they crowdsourced funding to donate 300 pairs of shoes to local elementary school students. He calls his family every day, without fail, checking in with his mother, daughters, and grandkids as often as he can.

One of the only brush-ups with trouble that he’s had while incarcerated was when a former cellmate, a “legendary” tattoo artist, gave him a tattoo of his daughter, Ziany, on his left shoulder. “The prison threw me in the hole for 30 days for getting it,” Ocampo wrote in an essay. “But it was well worth it. My family is the love of my life.”

He showed me the tattoo over video call from inside Coal Township. Ziany beams from the top of his arm. Just from the ink on his skin, the resemblance between the two is clear. 

At the end of the interview, Ocampo discussed the Lee ruling, and what it means for the hundreds of people he knows on the inside. 

“I try to stay busy and not pay too much attention to this decision, because you’ll grow crazy,” he said. He touched his bald head and laughed. “I tell people, I’m glad I ain’t got no hair I got to worry about falling out because I’d stress so much overthinking about it.” He’s poured more time into the Lifers’ Group; he’s picked up more shifts as a porter; he’s taking it, he says, “day by day.”

He said that, at the very least, Lee is a potential light at the end of the tunnel, which is better than nothing at all. “Before, I couldn’t even see the tunnel, let alone some light. And then we’re going from that to, well, we’re thrown in the light now.”

At home in Philadelphia, his family, as well as organizers and lawyers, are waiting patiently for a decision to be made by the legislature — and, with tentative hope, for Ocampo to finally come home.

“We waited 32 years,” Haw said. “To wait a couple of more weeks, months, years will mean nothing if it means bringing Phillip home.” She sniffles, smiles. “And if he does, I know my son is going to put boots to the ground and fight for the rest of them that are back in there.”