Talk:Murder of Jason Sweeney

Image
Does anyone know why the image of Jason was deleted?  Caden  cool  21:42, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Looking back at the history of the deleted file, it looks like it was deleted because a blocked or banned user had uploaded it, so it was deleted due to the user's violation of the ban, not because there was anything wrong with the image. IMHO a photo of a non-celeb murder victim who's been deceased since 2003 should be allowable from a fair use standpoint, so I put his picture back up. TheBlinkster (talk) 17:22, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for putting Jason's picture back up. It should never have been deleted in the first place.  Caden  cool  11:34, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Why is this page not called "Murder of Jason Sweeney"?
He was obviously murdered - didn't smash his own face to pieces and it sure wasn't an accident - and people have been convicted of the murder. I propose the page be renamed to "Murder of Jason Sweeney". Anyone care to discuss? TheBlinkster (talk) 14:49, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Hearing crickets, I went ahead and moved it to new title. TheBlinkster (talk) 03:40, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

The resentencing topic
I cleaned this article up today and in doing so, noticed that the previous version implied that Nicholas Coia got a resentencing hearing because the Supreme Court had struck down life without parole sentences (known "in the trade" as LWOPs) for juveniles. I suspect this was based on a Philadelphia Inquirer article that had a two line section noting the S Ct had struck these as unconstitutional. The Inquirer source was misleading (if not outright wrong), which happens sometimes when a reporter is not someone who covers the court in-depth or doesn't have enough legal knowledge to know what they shoudl say. Miller v. Alabama only struck down MANDATORY LWOPs for juveniles (a fact that this Sweeney article and the Inquirer article did not make clear) and also allowed the courts to resentence juveniles to LWOP after an individualized consideration of the circumstances (which the judge here did in sentencing Nicholas Coia to LWOP again). Furthermore, Pennsylvania is one of the states that decided not to retroactively apply Miller to resentence every juvenile sitting in prison with a mandatory LWOP. There are sources saying all the things I just said above, and I have put them into the article with my rewrite.

I'm editing my previous comment because after reading some court sources I was able to determine that Nicholas Coia and Edward Batzig both got resentencings (Batzig's apparently hasn't happened yet since no news coverage of the hearing) as their convictions were still on appeal so their sentences weren't "final". TheBlinkster (talk) 18:42, 18 January 2016 (UTC)