Commonwealth v. Brown4/29/2005
Appellant, John Wesley Brown, appeals from the Order of the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County, denying his petition for relief pursuant to the Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA), 42 Pa.C.S. §§ 9541-9546. For the reasons that follow, we affirm the order of the PCRA court.
The underlying facts of the case, as set forth by this Court on direct appeal, are as follows:
On June 10, 1990, appellant and his father, Wesley Brown, who was then seventy-seven years old, were together in their home in Philadelphia. A quarrel between the two occurred over appellant's use of his father's car for "hacking," that is, an unlicensed taxi service. Appellant shot his father four times with a .38 caliber pistol and left him to bleed to death in their home. A neighbor who heard the shots called the victim's granddaughter; she in turn called her grandfather. Appellant answered the phone and told his niece that her grandfather was outdoors. Appellant placed a .38 caliber revolver next to his father's body and took $400 from his father's wallet, then drove off in his father's car. He disposed of the murder weapon by throwing it out the car window in Maryland en route to Georgia.
Two days later appellant was stopped at a road check in Georgia; a computer check of appellant's driver's license disclosed that the license was expired, that the car was stolen, and that appellant was wanted in Pennsylvania for murder. Appellant admitted shooting his father, but claimed it was done in self-defense after his father pointed a .357 magnum pistol at him.
Following appellant's trial, the jury found him guilty of murder of the first degree, robbery, and possessing an instrument of crime. Following the penalty phase of the trial, the jury found that an aggravating circumstance existed, to-wit, that appellant had been convicted of a prior voluntary manslaughter; the jury also found three mitigating circumstances, namely, that appellant had no significant history of prior criminal convictions, that he acted under extreme mental or emotional disturbance, and that he had some other evidence of mitigation. In balancing the statutory factors, the jury concluded that the aggravating circumstance outweighed the mitigating circumstances, and unanimously reached a verdict of death.
Commonwealth v. Brown, 648 A.2d 1177, 1180 (Pa. 1994) (footnotes omitted).
Following his conviction, Appellant obtained new counsel and filed a direct appeal to this Court, raising numerous issues of trial court error as well as claims of counsel ineffectiveness. Our Court affirmed the judgment of sentence on October 6, 1994. Id. On January 15, 1997, Appellant filed a pro se PCRA petition. Current counsel was appointed to represent Appellant, and an amended petition was filed on April 2, 1998. Thereafter, Appellant filed supplemental pleadings, which he captioned as either replies to the Commonwealth's motions to dismiss or supplemental amended petitions. These pleadings were filed on August 26, 1998, October 9, 1998, April 1, 1998, and June 16, 1999. The Commonwealth responded to each pleading by filing motions to dismiss. On February 2, 1999, May 17, 1999 and December 22, 1999, the trial court conducted hearings for the sole purpose of determining whether an evidentiary hearing was warranted. After Appellant and the Commonwealth argued their legal positions, the trial court took the matter under advisement. On April 12, 2000, the trial court orally granted the Commonwealth's motion to dismiss the PCRA petition, and on April 13, 2000, the court filed its order and opinion in support thereof.
In this appeal from the PCRA court's dismissal of his petition, Appellant raises twenty
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